Sad news from Berlin: the passing of critic, novelist, and essayist Christa Wolf. Long credited for helping to establish a distinctive East German literary voice, Wolf was the author of numerous works, including Divided Heaven, The Quest for Christa T., Patterns of Childhood, Cassandra, Medea, On the Way to Taboo, and Accident: A Day's News. Though much of Wolf's work engaged with issues of feminism, self-reflexivity, societal pressures, and German fascism, it was her quest for "subjective authenticity" that helped to position her literary output in vital proximity to the social and political issues of her time. In 2002, Wolf was awarded the inaugural German Book Prize for her lifetime achievement.

In her 1994 lecture "Parting from Phantoms: On Germany," extracted here, Wolf reflects on Germany's reckoning with its history five years after reunification. Along the way, she describes confronting "a compromising phase in my past" and the uproar that ensued when she revealed that she had worked as an informal collaborator for the East German secret police between 1959 and 1962. "Parting from Phantoms: On Germany" appears in full in Christa Wolf's Parting from Phantoms: Selected Writings, 1990-1994, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Everything about Germany has been said. I make this claim after wearily pushing aside the stacks of recently published books, the piles of fresh newspaper articles that I have read, skimmed, or left unread. What a giant gruel Germans have been cooking up, talking and writing and analyzing and arguing and polemicizing and pontificating and lamenting, even satirizing themselves and Germany, in the past four years. We have stirred this gruel ourselves, put the pot on the fire, watched it simmer, bubble, sizzle, boil over; we have tasted it, eaten it up like good little children. But the gruel cannot be consumed, nor can it be held in check any longer. It is spilling over the stove and kitchen, out from the messy house onto the road, onto all the streets of our German cities, apparently bringing no nourishment to the homeless Germans who huddle there. And if we well-housed Germans want to be honest—and what do Germans today want more urgently than to be honest!—we must admit that we no longer like the taste of this German millet gruel. We are sick of it. We are fed up with it.

"No!" cries the German Suppenkaspar, the Boy Who Won't Eat His Soup, who along with his friend Struwwelpeter is just this year celebrating his 150th birthday in blooming health (that is, their story is still being printed in great numbers): "O take the beastly soup away / I won't eat any soup today!"' The question arises how a child raised to be antiauthoritarian can be forced to eat up the soup he has cooked himself, to swallow something he doesn't like….

Where am I headed? I am searching for a name for a feeling. In Santa Monica, I confronted a compromising phase in my past. I learned how difficult it can be to face the past honestly and adequately when, in Germany, "overcoming the past" on the public level usually takes the form of a chronicle of scandals or a mere skimming of documents—documents that reduce people's personal histories to simple patterns of yes or no, black or white, guilty or innocent, and provide no information beyond that. I thought then and still think that this credulous faith in files is possible only in Germany. I shall not forget, nor do I want to forget, the physical sensation of being replaced, piece by piece and limb by limb, by another person who was built to suit the media and seeing an empty place arise at the spot where I "really" was. It was an eerie sensation. I then found words for my eerie feeling: the disappearance of reality.

"Unreality" is a word Thomas Mann applied to Germany in 1934, when he was already abroad but not yet in exile. He spoke of the return to unreality. The phrase struck me and preoccupied me deeply. I would often travel up to Mann's house in Pacific Palisades and go down Amalfi Drive, where he used to walk almost daily when he was writing Doctor Faustus, that awe-inspiring self-confrontation of the German intelligentsia in their failure against fascism. Cautioning myself inwardly not to make pat comparisons, I wondered, Have we Germans now come together in a polity that at last is proof against the temptation to think "tragically, mythically, heroically" the kind of thinking Mann attributed in 1934 to the dear compatriots of his who had succumbed to German myth? Aren't we now thinking "economically," "politically"—that is, realistically—at last, in what Mann said was not the German way? Yes, if thinking economically means thinking that the maximization of profit is the highest of all values and if thinking politically means putting the interests of one's own party above everything else.

Am I being unjust? Partisan? Four and a half years of German unity, and myths and legends abound—some circulated intentionally, some necessarily arising from the way German unity is being pursued. The large-scale attempt to reduce the GDR to the status of an "unconstitutional state," to assign it to the realm of evil and thus to block historical thinking about it, has proved useful in the equally large-scale title challenges and mass expropriation of the property of GDR citizens. But above all it has helped hide the fact—from our West German fellow citizens, among others—that history is once again sailing in the direction favored by those who have enough clout to determine which way the wind blows. . . .

Where am I headed? I think that in East and West Germany it is time to part from the phantom that each was to the other for so long and thus to part from the phantom of our own land, too. Get down to business, Germany! And why not? We know what happens to denied, repressed reality: it disappears into the blind spot in our consciousness, where it engulfs activity and creativity and generates myths, aggressiveness, delusion. The spreading sense of emptiness and disappointment also produces social maladies and anomalies in which groups of young people "suddenly" drop out of civilization, cancel what seemed abiding social con-tracts, and turn into young zombies without com-passion, even for themselves. At a secondhand bookstore in Santa Monica, I found a story by Friedrich Torberg: "Mein ist die Rache" (Vengeance is mine). The author describes the sadistic practices of a concentration-camp commandant in 1943 who drives a group of Jewish prisoners to commit suicide one after another. It is almost unbearable to read. One reader, apparently an emigre German Jew, added some bitter marginal notes after the war. On the last page this reader penciled in, "America is full of Jews who love Germany and long for it."

The night after I read this book, a question occurred to me that has stayed on my mind ever since and that I want to pass on to you: What would we all give, each one of us, each individual German, for this not to have happened? It's a "pan-German" question. Perhaps we will know something more about ourselves if each one of us tries to answer it individually, as honestly and above all as concretely as possible. And doesn't it lead to three other questions that are worrying us: What was? What remains? What will be?

An English clergyman told us recently that the Germans must make up their minds about themselves, must learn to affirm themselves and the positive sides of their history; otherwise the young people would drift farther and farther away. My family thought about what we Germans could be proud of, what we have that is particularly good, and my fourteen-year-old grandson, who had just spent two weeks in the United States, said, "The bread we bake in Germany." We laughed, and the more I thought about it, the more I was satisfied with that answer. Bread as an ancient symbol and as everyday concreteness, as the food par excellence, a sensual pleasure you never tire of, simple and at the same time delicious. It fills you, it has aroma, it has flavor, and with its color and manifold shapes it is also a feast for the eyes. Along with wine, it stimulates conversation, friendship, hospitality. What I would like to see—and it's already happening—are Germans from different points of the compass working together, developing projects, and then sitting down around the table to talk, even to argue, and to eat, to eat in common, the soup they have cooked for themselves. To set on the table the bread they have brought from their various regions, offering it to each other and sharing it gladly and generously.

Translated by Jan van Heurck

Lecture given at the Dresden Staatsoper as part of the "Dresden Lectures" series, February 27, 1994. This translation (first published in PMLA, May 1996) ©1996 by the University of Chicago; all rights reserved.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Literature
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The publishing world has lost a lion in the death, at the age of eighty-five, of Morris Philipson, who served as Director of the Press from 1967 to 2000. During his tenure—the longest of any director in the Press's 119-year history—he raised the bar in academic publishing to unprecedented heights, promoting the intellectual revolutions in culture, scholarship, and the arts that characterized this dramatic period.

His remarkable judgment and taste earned him a reputation for making bold choices that resulted in pioneering works that defined their fields. This vision was exemplified by such monumental projects as The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, The Lisle Letters, and Yves Bonnefoy's Mythologies. Other outstanding publications included John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, a 1980 American Book Award winner that broke new ground in gender studies; the pioneering Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; several editions of the Chicago Manual of Style, the definitive reference for any writer; and Norman Maclean's best-selling A River Runs Through It. Philipson was also an innovator in paperback publishing, expanding the Press's commitment to reissuing classic works by provocative writers including André Malraux, Isak Dinesen, Anthony Powell, and Paul Scott.

Philipson took great pride in establishing the Press as one of America's leading publishers of translations, forging fruitful partnerships with French and German publishers in particular. Philipson and his editors introduced to an American audience works by Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Thomas Bernhard, among others. A translation of essays and letters by the German publisher Kurt Wolff, who as an émigré founded Pantheon Books, was for Philipson "an occasion to make conscious the fact that the character of a press is determined by the publisher making selections on the basis of his conceptions of art and serious thought," he told Publishers Weekly in 1991.

In recognition of his extraordinary contributions, in 1984, the French government awarded Philipson the Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his service to French letters, and in 1982 he became the first director of a scholarly press to win PEN American Center's Publisher Citation. Shortly before retiring in 2000 Philipson also received the Association of American Publishers' Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing.

Philipson was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and received his BA (1949) and MA (1952) from the University of Chicago. Abroad, he pursued studies at the Sorbonne and as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Munich. He received a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University where, under the mentorship of Jacques Barzun, he concentrated on aesthetics. As an advocate for the pursuit of "the best that has been said and thought in the world," he inspired the next generation by teaching courses in philosophy, cultural history, and literature at the Julliard School of Music, Hunter College, and the University of Chicago. Before returning to his alma mater to assume the directorship, he established his distinctive editorial style at Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, and Basic Books during the golden age of New York publishing.

His passion for publishing was reflected not only in recognizing the potential in other authors, but in realizing his own literary aspirations. He was the author of five acclaimed novels—Bourgeois Anonymous (Vanguard, 1965), The Wallpaper Fox (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), A Man in Charge (Simon & Schuster, 1979), Secret Understandings (Simon & Schuster, 1983), and Somebody Else's Life (Harper & Row, 1987)—as well as short stories and works of nonfiction. Cynthia Ozick praised his work as comprising "lucid and engaging prose, incisive social insight, high wit, ironic brilliance, narrative urgency, the puzzlement and poetry of human life."

Philipson and his wife, Susan, who died in 1994, shared their love of books and ideas by making their home a salon, where they entertained a diverse spectrum of writers, thinkers, and artists, including such luminaries as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jack Fuller, Wendy Doniger, and Bill Russo. This enthusiasm for discovery and sharing lives on with their children, Nicholas, Jenny, and Alex.

Archived in Literature | Publicity | UCP News
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Marjorie Perloff is the kind of critic who doesn't require an introduction. From her pathbreaking work on the experimental inheritances of modernist poetics to her championing of outsider approaches, both on and off the page, she has earned her moniker as grand dame of the avant garde. This past month alone saw Perloff reach two additional milestones, which came commingled under festive circumstances: a celebration of her eightieth birthday at the thusly inaugurated First Convention of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics in Wuhan, China.

Perloff abroad seems to have much in combine with the stateside prowess we've come to admire. Joined by pomo poetry's jester-magician Charles Bernstein, Perloff lectured on how she became a critic, and engaged with topics ranging from Duchamp's Readymades to Ginsberg's Howl. On her return to American shores, Perloff was greeted with an incisive piece from the Los Angeles Review of Books on "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism," where Joseph Campana engaged with issues of legacy and cultural visibility for four of our most celebrated (and occasionally, maligned!) literary critics, locating Perloff in the company of Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, and Marjorie Garber. As Campana put it:

It's hard not to get caught up in Perloff's zeal; I read her writing with real eagerness precisely because she seems certain that literature is alive, well, and constantly changing.

The piece considers Perloff's most recent offering Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, which takes a twenty-first century stance on the practices of appropriation, assemblage, and information channeling that dominate contemporary "unoriginal" works. What's most compelling about Perloff's take is how personal she finds these works to be, tracing their lineage of choice back to T. S. Eliot's vocal citations in The Wasteland and even Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, while extolling the ingenuity and pleasure to be found in this kind of remix.

Need another opinion? Modern Language Review just weighed in, summarizing Unoriginal Genius and its offerings:

Is this continuity or rupture, or perhaps an arriere-garde 'with a difference'? Perloff does not engage at length with these questions in the conclusion, thus leaving, like the poets she analyses, space for the reader to complete the text by teasing out the implications of the kind of poetry she has introduced and inviting us to think about the next direction for poetry in the new century, whether it be forward, back, or around with a twist.

We couldn't agree more, and though we've come to depend on Perloff's generous, astute readings of some of our favorite poets over the years, there's something special about the space on offer in UG. That kind of breathing room is its own sort of legacy, one absolutely overdue, and like the writing Perloff so aptly analyzes, surprisingly personal in its invitation.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
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We've got Parker. But do you? In the month of September, our free ebook takes you to the darker side of crime fiction: things get a bit remorseless quickly, as relentless thief Parker takes hard-boiled to the next level. It's time to settle The Score. Cult classics, these Starkly noirish riffs. We've set up a website devoted to the series, which began nearly fifty years ago and ran until 2008--and has been reprinted by volume by volume by the Press this past half decade. You'll find the entire canon there at 30 percent off, but who am I to criminally undermine our own endeavor (besides, truly: the kind of Parker I hang with knew that men seldom made passes at girls who wore glasses, and she ain't about to anti-hero herself mid-caper or two)? I'll leave things to Levi Stahl, promotions director, paperback sleuth, lit-blogger extraordinaire, and serious Parkerfile:

For nearly fifty years now, crime novel fans have been thrilling to the exploits of Parker, the ruthless, violent, and taciturn anti-hero of a series written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark. In 2008, the University of Chicago Press began to bring the Parker novels back into print, and the response from readers, reviewers, and other writers was tremendous.

For the month of September, we're pleased to offer new readers a chance to jump on the Parker bandwagon by giving away the e-book edition of one of the best books in the series, The Score.

The Score finds Parker going after a prize big enough to make him break one of his fundamental rules: if a heist requires more than five guys, it can't be done. But in this case, the temptation is just too great—there's a whole town ripe for the taking, and with a dozen hardened heisters in on the job, Parker's ready to pick it clean. Full of all the action, violence, and breathtaking plot twists that are Richard Stark's stock in trade, The Score is guaranteed to leave you wanting more.

"Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible." —Washington Post Book World

"Perhaps this, more than anything else, is what I admire about these novels: the consistent ruthlessness of an unapologetic bastard. And so if you're a fan of noir novels and haven't yet read Richard Stark, you may want to give these books a try. Who knows? Parker may just be the son of a bitch you've been searching for."—John McNally, Virginia Quarterly Review

"Whatever Stark writes, I read. He's a stylist, a pro, and I thoroughly enjoy his attitude."—Elmore Leonard

"Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust—these are the books you'll want on that desert island."—Lawrence Block

"Parker is refreshingly amoral, a thief who always gets away with the swag."—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

"Super-ingenious, super-lethal. . . . Parker is super-tough!"—New York Times Book Review

"The Parkers read with the speed of pulp while unfolding with an almost Nabokovian wit and flair."—Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Richard Stark's Parker novels . . . are among the most poised and polished fictions of their time, and, in fact, of any time."—John Banville, Bookforum

"Parker . . . lumbers through the pages of Richard Stark's noir novels scattering dead bodies like peanut shells. . . . In a complex world [he] makes things simple."—William Grimes, New York Times

"Elmore Leonard wouldn't write what he does If Stark hadn't been there before. And Quentin Tarantino wouldn't write what he does without Leonard. . . . Old master that he is, Stark does all of them one better."—Los Angeles Times

"Crime fiction stripped down—as it was meant to be. . . .Oh, how the pages keep turning."—Philadelphia Inquirer
"For suspense fans who cheer for the bad guys."—Washington Post

"Nobody tops Stark.—New York Times

"One of the most original characters in mystery."—Mystery News

Archived in Literature | UCP News
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Parker—violent anti-hero, dangerous predator, single-named fictional protagonist who chases after ex-partners, ex-wives, and well-executed financial transfers—is about to become a cinema star again. Previous film adaptations of Donald Westlake qua Richard Stark's popular crime fiction novels have been helmed by iconic male stars such as Lee Marvin, Peter Coyote, and yes, Mel Gibson (by iconic, we mean some combination of hardboiled, hallucinogenic, and headcase-y). In the Taylor Hackford-directed Parker (set to release in October 2012—if we're not too distracted by the pending return of Quetzalcoatl), Jason Statham will take his turn at the marvelous villain, via a screenplay based on the recently rereleased Flashfire. The only thing that could make this all that much more interesting is . . . Jennifer Lopez. Done and done.

With all this in mind, and apologies to Jason Statham, we've reconsidered the casting and thought about five other actors fit to finesse our ruthless protagonist:

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
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In a recent issue of the New Yorker, UCP author Stephen Greenblatt reminds us of the "strikingly modern" outlook of De rerum natura, Roman philosopher Lucretius's epic, 7400-line poem On the Nature of Things, and its Epicurean atomic mindblow. Amid the celestial provenance of fortuna—fate, not divine intervention—Lucretius mixed up explanations of the material world (lightning, earthquakes, and heat) with a primer on disease and a pestilent description of a plagued Athens.

As Greenblatt notes:

Every page reflected a core scientific vision—a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—imbued with a poet's sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius, it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live—not in fear of the gods but in pursuit of pleasure, in avoidance of pain. As it turned out, there was a line from this work to modernity, though not a direct one.

Should we follow that path? In The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition, Gerard Passannante takes us along these lines, tracing the rise of materialism in early modern Europe through the dissemination of Lucretius in scholarly practice and humanist thought. Blending Virgil, Bacon, Spenser, Montaigne, Newton, Henry More, and others, Passannante arrives at a particularly circuitous pensivity: What does it mean for a text to be reborn?

Greenblatt surrenders, er swerves, to this Lucretian lineage in an earlier piece for Harvard magazine, as well as the New Yorker article, and his most recent book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. For Lucretius, the world was in perpetual motion, a flurry of atom-like particles that collided and conjoined in a literal swerve of stellar movement. Science may have changed, but we can still get down.

Archived in Books for the News | Classics | Literature
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In the week since Fourth of July celebrations rang out on every neighborhood block and city stoop (at least in Chicago's Logan Square, where the Crime Blotter lit up like a game of Pong with noise violations well into mid-week), we've had a chance to surf through the op-eds, remembrances, and the short- and long-form explorations of social and political freedoms published in the holiday's wake. One that extends beyond grist-of-the-mill celebration is Eric Slauter's "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" in the Boston Globe, a blockbuster foray into the reception history of the Declaration of Independence, which considers the circumstances surrounding the document's most storied sentence :

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Using new digital tools to consider newspaper accounts, sermons, Supreme Court rulings, almanacs, and facsimiles from the day of the Declaration and beyond, Slauter advances the Declaration's most iconic clause ("a radical commitment to equality") as inspiration for the abolitionists of the early nineteenth century, the workingmen's movement of the 1820s, and a certain 1848 convention in Seneca Falls, while at the same time appealing to a changing context, wherein Abraham Lincoln claimed that the Founding Fathers must have boldly envisioned its phrasing for some "future use" and Frederick Douglass (1852) heard the Declaration's "shouts of liberty and equality" as nothing more than "hollow mockery."

In the Globe piece, Slauter grounds the phrase in its own history:

But at the time, very few in the newly United States besides a small contingent of black and white antislavery activists would have seen the Declaration as a document of radical egalitarianism or even as a founding document. That we do so now is a testament in part to their efforts, and to generations of readers since who have pressed the United States to live up to those words. It is truly their Declaration, rather than Jefferson's or Congress's, that we celebrate today.

Combining literary scholarship with its more pragmatic social contexts is nothing new for Slauter. In The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution, Slauter explores the origins and meanings of the U.S. Constitution from a vantage that places agency with the key actors who founded the nation—and who considered this new government to be a work of art framed from natural rights. The runner-up for the Modern Language Association's First Book Prize, The State as a Work of Art has been praised by Gordon S. Wood in the New Republic as "richly imaginative" and "the first full-scale effort by a literary scholar to bring to bear the special tools of his discipline on the Constitution and its cultural origins."

What better mix of politic and rhetoric to further usher in July, when dog days advance and the pursuit of happiness becomes that much more surreal?

Archived in History | Literature | Politics and Current Events
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In the twenty-first century, Ivo Andrić's profile has remained surprisingly low for a Nobel Prize winner (his 1961 citation for the Prize in Literature commends "the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country"). That is, until now.

The Guardian recently reported on a collaboration between filmmaker (and two-time Cannes Palme d'or winner) Emir Kusturica and the Republika Srpska's government to build a new town inspired by Andrić's writings: Andrićgrad. Work on the 17,000 square meter town is "due to start this week and to be completed by 2014."

In his own day, Andrić (1892-1975) was a poet, novelist, civic servant, diplomat, deputy foreign minister, and parliamentarian. Born and raised in Bosnia (his writing is claimed by Serbs and Croats alike), Andrić was perhaps best known for his "Bosnian trilogy," three works that drew upon the history, culture, and folk wisdom of his native country. The first of these works, The Bridge on the Drina, spans nearly four centuries of Muslim and Orthodox Christian life in Bosnia and Herzegovina, through the prism of a town and its bridge across the river.

"Here, where the Drina flows with the whole force of its green and foaming waters from the apparently closed mass of the dark steep mountains, stands a great clean-cut stone bridge with eleven wide sweeping arches," Andrić wrote in The Bridge on the Drina. "From this bridge spreads fanlike the whole rolling valley with the little oriental town of Visegrad and all its surroundings, with hamlets nestling in the folds of the hills, covered with meadows, pastures and plum-orchards, and criss-crossed with walls and fences and dotted with shaws and occasional clumps of evergreens. Looked at from a distance through the broad arches of the white bridge it seems as if one can see not only the green Drina, but all that fertile and cultivated countryside and the southern sky above."

For Kusturica, Andrićgrad will not only serve as the setting for his forthcoming film adaptation of The Bridge on the Drina, but will also further his interest in envisioning and constructing villages, which began with Kustendorf, a settlement he built in western Serbia, and for which he feels an affinity of place not dissimilar to Andrić:

"This is my Utopia. I lost my city (Sarajevo) during the war, now this is my home. I am finished with cities. I spent four years in New York, ten in Paris, and I was in Belgrade for a while. To me now they are just airports. Cities are humiliating places to live, particularly in this part of the world. Everything I earn now goes into this."

Archived in Books for the News | History | Literature
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A review of Julia Lupton's Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life from a recent issue of the Time Higher Ed opened with a clip from Samuel Johnson on the Bard:

"There is," wrote Johnson in the magnificent preface to his edition of the plays," always an appeal open from criticism to nature." Shakespeare is true to life when he shows joy bumping up against sorrow and the sublime against the ridiculous.

The review went on to call into account Lupton's premise: that to "think with Shakespeare" was to learn about both politics and life, as well as to call into question how—with nods to Agamben and Arendt—Shakes might help us unravel a contemporary crisis or two.

The next afternoon, reading a piece by Rosemary Counter in the Globe and Mail on Carrie Pitzulo's Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy, we were reminded of Johnson's reference to the open appeal. Here, too, in a review that delved into the viability of Pitzluto's premise, was a question that posited the sublime with the ridiculous: can we "think with Playboy?"

In search of answers, Pitzulo begins with what we're all thinking: the centerefolds. While objectification comes straight to mind, Hefner believes playmates are "glorified" as a "friend and equal." And, to his credit, they're far from wanton libertines or nameless nudes: through interviews, the Playmates are often presented as educated, assertive, hard-working and individualist (also presented, however, are their measurements).

In the instance—and interest—of both works, however, the real question fielded by their authors seems to be the validity of a revisionist account, and how such a return in recent criticism might help us to explore the social constructs that these two monster narratives have imbued in our cultural consciousness.

Never the twain shall meet? How about a particularly dramatic revisiting of Harry Nilsson's ubiquitous ode to "The Desk" from Playboy After Dark? Not quite the quandary of Caliban's age or minority status, and isolated from the the question of whether Hef's notion of gender as a social construct and sexuality as a wide spectrum was ahead of its time, but still a moment when we might again use a mix of high and low culture to enter that shapeshifting space between politics and life:

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Sociology
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’Tis the season for award announcements and prize citations, and we're delighted to announced several recent winners and acknowledge their achievements.

We begin with an award close to home: the Gordon J. Laing Prize, which is awarded annually by the University of Chicago Press (since 1963) to the faculty author, editor, or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction. This year, we honor Robert J. Richards for The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought.

Continue reading "Awards, fellowships, and recent accolades" »

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
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"Strange indeed are the places that give birth to the ideas that later, for better or worse, find physical form as books. I first encountered my subject lying on my back in a dentist's chair. In an effort to distract the minds of those undergoing treatment, the dentist in question had attached a large photographic poster to the ceiling depicting the earth at night, seen from space. It is to the distant yet familiar world that his patients cast their eyes, sometimes blurred by tears, sometimes pre-naturally sharpened by the effort of ignoring their discomfort. What they learn is that much of the planet we inhabit no longer experiences 'night' as it was once understood."

So James Attlee begins Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, his meditation on the sublunar landscape and all things lux illuminata. Praised by Dominique Browning in the New York Times Book Review as "an inspiration," Nocturne left our critic commenting, "It makes you want to pull a chair out into the garden and bathe in the moonlight. No questions asked."

Jonathan Messinger, of Time Out Chicago, championed Attlee's occasionally gruff yet wildly wondering prose as that of "our kind of codger," while the Sunday Telegraph was struck by how much pleasure Attlee takes "from simply looking."

In addition to reviews of the book, Attlee has been gracing international pages with commentaries and essays on lunar-lit concerns, from a piece on the moon in literature for the Independent and on the supermoon in the Telegraph to a consideration of darkness in the Observer. All of this, not at all unexpected, from someone whose touchstones shift with such ease from Goethe, Auden, and Basho, to black and white photography, copper mines, and True Detective Magazine.

Piqued your interest?

Listen to Attlee reading excerpts from the book (in streaming format) here, taped during a recent Press trip to Oxford, UK. And, as ever, for additional information about Nocturne, pay a visit to the book's University of Chicago Press webpage.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Literature
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"I did the job with a guy," Parker said. "I guess I'll get in touch with him again."

Donald E. Westlake was a twentieth-century master of crime fiction. Under the name Richard Stark, one of his many pseudonyms, he penned the legendary Parker novels, including three just brought back into print by the University of Chicago Press this week: Butcher's Moon (1974), Comeback (1997), and Backflash (1998), each with a new foreword by Westlake's friend and writing partner Lawrence Block. To celebrate their release, Press publicity manager and Parker masterfan Levi Stahl sat down with Brian Garfield, novelist (author of the cult classics Death Wish and Hopscotch), screenwriter, and an old friend of Westlake's. What's in store? Behind-the-scenes snapshots of a legendary poker game, insight into the film adaptations spawned by the Parker series, a look into Westlake's writing process, and more:

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LTS: First off, why don't you just tell us a bit about your friendship with Donald Westlake. When and where did you meet? Were you friends for a long time?

BG: We met at a poker game in New York, 1965. It was a regular weekly quarter-limit writers' game. Lawrence Block and agent Henry Morrison were regulars. The game was a wonderful source of one-liners—now if only I remembered them. . . .

We all were young and had egos; we hoped the other guys at the table would like our work, so we shared it quite a bit, but we weren't really looking for critiques. That came later. Bob Ludlum came once in a while, as did various other writers; Justin Scott became a regular. The game stopped for a while but was revived and goes on to this day, I think; I left New York in 1979, so have been away from it for a long time. These photos are from a night in early 1972 when the game was held in my apartment, where, when we weren't playing poker, I was busy writing Death Wish.

Don and Larry and Justin and Henry and I became close friends from the mid-1960s through the '70s; we built each other's bookcases, and those of Otto Penzler's Mysterious Bookshop, and we helped one another move. Sometime in the early 1970s my then-wife and I bought a beach house in Fair Harbor (Fire Island) near Don and his wife Abby's place. We all would summer out there with our respective wives and friends. There were games, picnics, political discussions, expeditions, consumption of beer and spirits, occasional lit'ry discussions. We talked quite a bit about books we'd read, but mostly it wasn't derogatory chatter; we reserved that sort of thing for the personalities rather than the works—though we'd read the handwritten manuscript of Bob Ludlum's first novel and loftily we all pronounced it unpublishable, as did several publishers. Henry Morrison said we were missing something important. He became Bob's agent. I expect the experience taught the rest of us a thing or two.

Our "lit'ry" discussions might have seemed odd to people who weren't writers. For example I remember Don's fascination with the way Ira Levin had cleverly concealed the identity of the killer in A Kiss Before Dying, and we all admired the way Mickey Spillane solved the mystery in Vengeance is Mine in the final word of the novel. I don't know that it's ever been done that way before. Spillane was a comic book-style writer, but we all thought he was much underrated as a storyteller. We didn't talk about his writing style; we talked about his inventiveness. It helps, I suppose, to realize that we all had worked our way up through the pulps—probably the last generation to do that, as the pulps mostly died by the early 1960s. Don and Larry wrote crime stories and softcore porn; I wrote crime stories and Westerns. (They came from the Northeast; I came from the Southwest.) We all had been published since the end of the 1950s. By the mid-60s we'd found a way to do the apprenticeship and make a sort of living out of it, although it wasn't a great living; most of my early books earned somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand dollars. All that meant was we had to write them fast. We thought of the work as fun, challenging but easy to do.

By 1970 Don had published several comic novels. The Busy Body, God Save the Mark, and a few others had come out, and that year he published his first Dortmunder novel, The Hot Rock. He was also finishing Comfort Station (by "The Vibrant J. Morgan Cunningham"); Henry Morrison, by then his agent, had it typed on rolls of toilet paper to submit it to New American Library.

Don Westlake had a blinding-fast mind. He always seemed to have on the tip of his tongue the sort of wonderful witty rejoinders that occur to most of us a day or two too late. In 1970 we got the idea that it would be amusing to try combining our strengths in a Western comedy novel. We wrote Gangway!, and it turned out to be quite funny, I think. Henry sold it and it did fairly well. But our ambitions to sell it as a basis for a movie didn't work out. And we'd done it in a silly way—each of us would write a draft, then turn it over to the other, who'd rewrite the whole thing and give it back. It was about four times as much work as either of us would have put in individually on a book. So we didn't try that again. But it was fun, and we got to know each other's working styles.

The writing life, for a novelist, is solitary, and if you're working full time the pressures can create a kind of loneliness. Most of us prefer to work alone much of the time, I think, but there's a limit. Don and I enjoyed working together at intervals, simply to alleviate the solitariness and to correct a few of one another's bad writing habits. We worked intermittently on several projects, from my script for Butcher's Moon and the foreword I wrote to a 1981 edition of The Outfit to what became the movie The Stepfather, which was, I like to think, a very good movie inspired by coincidence.

It took off from the true case of John Emil List, who'd murdered his entire family in New Jersey, then disappeared. My thought was "What about this guy's next wife and family?" The viewpoint character ought to be the teen-age stepdaughter, I thought. I have no children and would not have written that relationship very well at all. Don had married the charming Abigail Adams, who had several kids in their teens, including a daughter. It struck me he would be the best of all writers for it, or at least the best of all writers I knew. We discussed it several times—I remember tossing notions back and forth on drives from New York out to Fire Island. His ideas struck me as superb. At that time I was a would-be Big Shot—had put together a film company (Shan Productions) with backing by several investors. Our first actual production was Hopscotch (the Walter Matthau film, from my novel) but while it was still waiting for production Don was working on his screenplay for The Stepfather. I don't remember exactly when he delivered it, but between the long time it took us to get Hopscotch in the can and my idiocy as a producer, it took several years before we found an organization willing to take on The Stepfather. We even tried one or two variant versions of the screenplay in our desperation to sell it, but they weren't as good as Don's, so we kept going back to that. Don made a few revisions here and there, but essentially it sprang from him whole, like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter.

ITC finally took it on, and Don worked with director Joseph Ruben. I wasn't there, so I don't know what they did together, but the film is pretty much as it was in Don's original screenplay. ITC made the movie in Canada on a budget of three rubber bands and a paper clip, but it looks fine. Don was more critical of that movie than I was, however. Certainly it's a genre piece, but a damn good genre piece, because he wrote it splendidly, and it was performed and directed splendidly. The star was Terry O'Quinn, an unknown at the time, who gave a superb performance. The movie won festival awards and became a cult favorite, and I still think it's one of the best character-study movies of its time, thanks mostly to Don, with the assistance of Terry O'Quinn and Joseph Ruben, who added elements when they brought the material from the page to the screen. That's usually the secret of a good movie—several people having exceptionally good days at the same time.

LTS: You've talked about how you and Don would discuss what you both were working on. Given the leanness of his prose and the clockwork precision of his plots, I would imagine he would have been a good first reader and critic—was that the case?

BG: I don't remember any specific direct criticisms he gave me of my work, and I never felt confident enough of my opinions to parse his. Our group wasn't in competition; even in the absence of another member, we almost never talked about the absent member's work. Sometimes Don liked my stuff (Hopscotch especially, and Death Wish—the novel, not the movie) and sometimes he thought it was overblown or pretentious (he was particularly huffy about The Romanov Succession, calling it a poor imitation of a Ludlum story, which it probably was, but what the hell, Ludlum was a friend of ours and Henry Morrison had made him a star and I thought I'd give it a try. It didn't work, so I didn't do it again).

I was blown away by the Parker novels and by the magic of Don's comic stories. We didn't have long talks about it. Writers develop passions for peculiar projects—his was the nonfiction book Under an English Heaven (which he'd wanted to call The Natives Are Revolting), mine was the biography The Meinertzhagen Mystery (nee Raptor), but I don't recall discussing either book with Don. His was amusing but didn't sell very well, and I suppose mine falls into the same category, although it sold about as well as we expected.

We did have ferocious discussions of the movies made out of our various works, however. There was a baseline difference: a book is mainly a writer's own work; a movie has many makers. You may have written the novel, but unless you produced, directed, starred in, photographed, scored, edited and got lucky with a movie, it isn't entirely yours. When a movie survives all that, it must have had a damn good screenplay to begin with and it also must have been very lucky to attract the crowd of people who served that screenplay. Don had that on The Grifters, certainly. I had it on Hopscotch.

LTS: Speaking of movies, you wrote a screenplay for Butcher's Moon that was never produced. How did that come about, both the writing and the mothballing? And how did you handle the sheer overstuffedness of the book—which is one of its chief pleasures? It's got two rival gangs, a dozen or more heisters, and action galore, and at the same time it brings together characters, threads, and themes from nearly all the preceding fifteen novels. But those qualities could be deadly impediments to the necessarily tighter, more self-contained form of a screenplay. How did you handle those problems?

BG: Butcher's Moon, the book, was bought by 20th Century Fox. Charles Bronson had an estate across the Hudson River from Albany, and he'd agreed to do Butcher's Moon if it could be filmed in and around Albany so he could commute to work. Michael Winner had said he'd direct Butcher's Moon as his next project. These elements were all in place when Don recommended that Fox hire me to write the script; I'd just written the introduction for the book of Butcher's Moon, and my Death Wish was just then being filmed in New York with Bronson, directed by Michael Winner.

I was not a first-class screenwriter then. I don't remember feeling challenged by the "overstuffedness" of it. Don's sense of story structure was superb, and I'm sure my script must have followed the book—perhaps too closely, but I don't remember being confused or put off by the number of characters. I'd read most, perhaps all, of the previous Parker novels, and I do remember combining several characters and simplifying some of the off-screen back-story, but that didn't seem too challenging.

I probably turned in a serviceable second draft, but by then I think the subject had become moot. The producers had cooled, Bronson had cooled, and Winner had finished filming Death Wish—a movie that both Don and I, having seen it in screenings, disliked. It became a huge hit in the summer of '74, at a time when I was in Africa researching something else. I sort of understand the appeal of the movie—it had an excellent screenplay by Wendell Mayes—but I thought it was a hasty and indifferent job of filmmaking. I suppose Don and I both failed to hide our disappointment with the movie, so it's not too surprising that both Bronson and Winner walked away. Without them, I gather Fox had very little interest in pursuing the project.

LTS: What did Westlake think of your screenplay? Did he give you any tips?

BG: The only thing I remember his saying was that there were too many telephone calls in it, but he assumed we'd clear that up in a third draft. Other than that, I don't recall his liking or disliking it. We went to screenings of each other's movies, but I don't recall post-morteming them; a movie is nearly always somebody else's, and anyhow it's already in the can. The only time we ever told each other what, or how, to write anything was on Gangway! and mostly that was because I supplied most of the jokes and he made them better. Gawd, I still miss him.

LTS: As you mentioned earlier, Westlake wrote screenplays—including an Oscar-winning adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Grifters. But he never (as far as I know?) wrote any screenplays based on his own material—even as he was never fully satisfied with any of the films that were made from Parker novels. Was there a reason for that?

BG: Several reasons. One, obviously, is that if you've written the novel then you've already told the story. Writing it in another form can be boring. It's much more interesting to adapt someone else's story for the screen—you haven't written it before. Another, probably less obvious, is that if a studio or producer buys your book, then it's their (or his) movie to ruin. If you write the screenplay, you're likely to get blamed if it's a bad movie based on your own novel. As Don said, "If I write a novel, I'm a god. If I write a screenplay, I'm a minor deity."

It may be true that Don was not fully satisfied with any of the Parker films, but he did like Point Blank a lot—we talked several times about director John Boorman's imaginative use of imagery and time, such as the scene in which Lee Marvin is shown waiting in a room, and then is shown waiting in the same room but this time it's unfurnished—like the character's mind. I don't think Don was crazy about the Alcatraz frame for the film's story—it struck him as pretentious—but he liked Marvin and he liked most of what Boorman did with it. Also to some extent he liked The Outfit, partly because of its casting—director John Flynn cast Robert Duvall in the lead, and filled the 1973 movie with film noir actors from an earlier time, such as Robert Ryan, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, Sheree North, Richard Jaekel, Tim Carey, and Elisha Cook Jr.

The rest of the Parker movies were routine except for Made in USA, and adaptation of The Jugger by Jean-Luc Godard that was incredibly bad—so bad that Don sued Godard in French court, won the lawsuit, and prevented the film from being mass-exhibited in the United States for many years. (You can get a copy now on DVD, but unless you're a masochist it ain't worth it.)

He never sold the Parker character, so the leading man in each of the movies has a different name. This was largely a commercial decision—if you give up the character, you may have given up all the books. (Joe Gores and I ran into that silliness when we tried to sell a Sam Spade screenplay.) But Don remarked more than once that the Parker character "obviously lacks definition," because in various movies the character was played by Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Peter Coyote, Mel Gibson—and Anna Karina.

LTS: Did you have any specific actor in mind who would have been a great Grofield? I think we've all got ideas about Parker, but Grofield seems tougher to cast—any thoughts?

BG: The only time we ever mentioned it was shortly after we'd been to a play and a party afterward, where Kevin Kline and Ben Gazzara and several others were present, and I said I thought Kevin Kline would play Grofield very well. Don agreed, but that was as far as it went. Don didn't write Grofield as a cinematic character. It's a mistake to write a book with one eye on the movies—you end up with a bad book that won't get filmed.

LTS: You've been a successful writer in a variety of genres. Were there any specific lessons you took from Westlake's work that were helpful along the way?

BG: Just one I can remember. If you begin a sentence—or, particularly, if you begin a book—with the word "When," then something just about has to happen right away. People who knew him miss not just the writing but Donald E. Westlake the person. He was unique—a treasure.

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Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Commentary | Literature
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Artist, critic, poet, performer . . . model? While David Antin's iconic image has adorned the covers of many of his most famous publications—from the stark black and white photograph of the author in a safari jacket on talking at the boundaries (New Directions, 1976) to the Colonel Kurtz-on-the-roof shot of Antin accompanied by an assistant in stonewashed denim jacket on A Conversation with David Antin (Granary Books, 2002) —few might realize the careful consideration behind this striking framing (though Caroline Bergvall has a great piece at Jacket on A Conversation that leads with an exploration of the cover image). Many of these images were shot by the American photographer and longtime Antin collaborator Phel Steinmetz and Antin's most recent collection Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005, proves no exception—in fact, the decision to run a black and white cover was even an homage to the use of Steinmetz's earlier images on Antin's previous volumes.

We asked Antin to share his thoughts on the discussion that went on behind the scenes before he decided on the image that now graces the cover of Radical Coherency. Antin responded in his characteristic conversationalist tone, imbuing his thoughts on this process with larger reflection on what this particular kind of image might embody:

When it came to thinking about a cover for Radical Coherency, I called on my usual team—Elly and Phel. Elly [Eleanor Antin] had designed my first book definitions and consulted on all the others, and Phel Steinmetz had shot the photo images for four of my earlier books. So we got together over coffee in our dining room and started to work it out. Radical Coherency was not like any of my other books. It was a Selected of past works from 1966 to 2005. So I wanted a cover that carried the sense of me looking at my past. That meant it was going to be a photograph with me in it. Elly thought it should be shot in the southern California landscape around our house. "You're a Southern California poet and that's where you live." I thought it could be a shot of me coming up our rugged driveway and Phel agreed but thought a shot taken behind the house might be just as good. We decided to try both places. But then Phel said he had an idea he was toying with but didn't know if it would work out. He would take two shots of me—one a full length, facing the camera, and the other a close-up over my shoulder—that he could combine to give the sense that I'm looking at myself. We all liked the idea but I wondered whether the over the shoulder shot would read clearly as me. "You just wear that old Safari jacket," Elly said. "The one you've been wearing since Phel shot the cover for talking at the boundaries back in '76. Who else looks like a bald poet in an old safari jacket?" Phel took the shots and came back with different scale versions of the two of them, laid them out on our dining room table, and we picked the two we liked best. But in the frontal shot I was carrying the safari jacket, not wearing it, and the over-the-shoulder shot was too close up for certain recognition. Studying the combined image, I realized I wasn't sure which shot represented the present and which the past, and even whether the Buddha-like image of the over-the-shoulder shot was really me. So after all that planning, it was ambiguous—like nearly all the artworks I'm interested in. And we liked that and decided to go for it.

david antin

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Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Commentary | Literature
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David Antin, champion of avant-garde sensibility, performance poet, critic, and peerless conversationalist was once David Antin, small press magazine editor. As an excerpt—from Antin's Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005—recently published by Design Observer recalls, Antin's days editing some/thing with his friend Jerome Rothenberg were not without their difficulties.

Without giving everything away, we'll quickly make mention that the excerpt is taken from the book's Introduction, in which Antin charts his course from linguistics doctoral student to critic of art and literature. Along the way he encounters a cast of characters that reads like a Who's Who of twentieth-century cultural life: Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, John Ashbery, LeRoi Jones, John Baldessari, Frank O'Hara, Stan Brakhage, Allen Ginsberg, and paintings by Klee, Kandinsky, and Kirchner, among others. Zoning in on one particular episode that featured Andy Warhol designing the cover of some/thing's Vietnam issue, Antin remembered:

When I went to see Andy I showed him our previous issues and told him about the Vietnam issue we were planning, he said, "Great!" What he'd really like to do was a Vietcong flag. But I said, "What we'd like you to do is take a prowar slogan like 'BOMB HANOI!' put it on the cover as a button, and fuck it up any way you like." So Andy said, "Great!" and I thought it was settled. But over the next two weeks I ran into Gerard Malanga twice in the Eighth Street Bookshop, and he told me Andy would really like to do a Vietcong flag. Finally I said, "Look Gerard, I don't know too much about the Vietcong, and neither do you or Andy. But what we do know about are the American warmongers. So what I want is for Andy to take one of their idiot slogans and fuck it up any way he likes for our cover. That way any member of the American Legion could pick up a copy on a news stand and maybe read it." Andy finally did it with the image of the BOMB HANOI button repeated over and over gain on a cover that functioned as a page of grungy looking stamps you could tear apart along the perforations and if you felt like it glue on a wall. When I gave Allen Ginsberg his copy, Allen's jaw dropped and he said "What's this?" Then he turned it over, saw his name on the back and said, "It's all right, I'm in it."

some/thing Vol. 2, No.1, Winter 1966
(image and caption courtesy of David Antin)

"The cover Warhol finally approved for the Bomb Hanoi issue. The cover was a sheet of real glue-backed stamps, made convenient for tearing out and pasting on telephone poles or subway walls by real perforations. It carried the deteriorated pro-war image Warhol was trying to show in all its pro-war shabbiness. It rhymed with the collage of war-promoting propaganda of the American and South Vietnamese Generals and the 'Best and the Brightest'—the Rusks, the McNamaras, the Rostows and the still servile American press that surrounded a hapless LBJ in which we embedded the poetry and prose of the American avant garde."

For additional images from some/thing's Vietnam issue, including the cover's first take and the issue's table of contents, visit the Observatory archive at Design Observer; for more information on Radical Coherency, visit the book's UCP page here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Literature
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Yesterday marked the twenty-eighth anniversary of the death of Arthur Koestler (1905-83), one of the twentieth century's more complicated—and controversial—figures: a former Communist Party member and anti-totalitarian scribe; a university dropout, born in Budapest to a mother who was once a patient of Freud, who later renounced his citizenship; a pioneer of science studies with an intrepid interest in the paranormal; and a man frequently preoccupied with death and uncertainty who committed suicide.

Among his numerous biographies, novels, and essays is the work Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, which chronicles the fall of Málaga in 1937, when Koestler was a German exile writing for a British newspaper. Arrested by Nationalist forces, Koestler spent the next three months in a prison cell in Seville, watching fellow prisoners meet their execution without notice and living in constant fear that his life could end at any moment.

The result is a mix of Doestoevskian insight and journalistic observation. Part journal and part reconstruction, Dialogue with Death is Koestler's conversation with himself, filled with moments of eerily "Olympian calm" and "colorless disappointment." Koestler reads Nerval, Bunin, Stevenson, Tolstoy, Plato, St. Simeon, and others, speaks broken Spanish, and considers the anniversary of the Republic, all while ripping strips off of his shirt to stuff into his ears so as not to hear the cries of those shot during the night.

But the candor and extreme self-analysis that carry through this type of experience can often alter perspective. What kind of narrative journalist is Koestler? And what type of biographical writing does the book become? In his Introduction to the new University of Chicago Press edition, Louis Menand makes mention of one salient fact:

There is no reason to doubt anything in the account Koestler gives in Dialogue with Death of his arrest and his ninety-four days in captivity, but there is one major elision. As he made clear in the preface he wrote for the 1967 reprinting of the book, contrary to what William Randolph Heart, the fifty-six MPs, and the League of Nations may have believed, Koestler was not really a journalist when he went to Spain. He was exactly what Franco suspected him of being: a Communist agent. And so he genuinely was, for those three months, at every moment on the verge of being shot. Oddly, this elision (or evasion) is what gives this nonfiction book a kind of literary permanence.

It's just this sort of detail that makes Koestler the memoir writer as complicated as Koestler the man. As Menand continues:

It is not likely that Koestler was embarrassed about his Communist past. He would write openly about it just a few years later, in The God that Failed; and, in any case, he seems a man who was embarrassed by nothing. He must have seen that the reasons for finding himself in the situation he describes in Dialogue with Death are not important. Between 1933 and 1945, millions of Europeans, the grand and the ordinary, the infamous and the insignificant, found themselves confronted with the knock on the door, with an imminent threat of annihilation. Dialogue with Death is the story of a man who escaped, and only by a hair, his own knock on the door.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Literature
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Oxford is a city that with a rich history and receptive memory: a crossroads where the Thames changes its name to Isis; land of the ford, Tolkien, Murdoch, and Bayley; home of Pressed Steel to the east and a certain medieval University on its left-facing bank. The quintessential—yet entirely unique—university town. Or is it?

You'll want to consider this before departing on your own pilgrimage, with art publisher and writer James Attlee, in our free e-book for the month of March, Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey.

Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates a particular area in order to present it in detail, and that's just what the book does for Oxford's Cowley Road. Drawing from sources ranging from Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy and Cage's 4'33" to readings of Lucretius and contemporary art, our guide engages with every aspect of Cowley Road's eclectic culture: pornography emporiums, sensory deprivation tanks, halal shops, and car factories included. Accompanied by a notebook and a tape recorder, Attlee records the immediate details of his surroundings and revels in the allegorical depths of the everyday. The result? This eloquent hymn in praise of the invigorating, complex nature of the twenty-first century city and the ultimate East Oxford book.

"An iridescent picture of a new Oxford that no guide book has yet captured."—New York Times

"Attlee's reading is deep and wide and engagingly circuitous, and this book frequently provides the delights of discovery that make any adventure worth undertaking."—Bookforum

Curious? Read an excerpt. Or download your free copy of Isolarion today (and through the end of the month)—and if you like what you read, consider accompanying Attlee on another voyage: this one by moonlight.

(More about Chicago Digital Edition our free e-book of the month program, including a chance to subscribe and discounts on related books, can be found here.)

Archived in Books for the News | Cartography and Geography | Literature
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Literary critic, esteemed professor, rhetorician, and scholar, Wayne C. Booth was born to Mormon parents in American Fork, Utah, on February 22, 1921. A young Booth served on a mission for the church before completing undergraduate work at Brigham Young University (1944) and graduate studies at the University of Chicago (1950).

Also ninety years ago this week, the word "robot" was ushered into the global idiom with the premiere of Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), a play that debuted on the stages of Prague (1921) before launching a four-month run at Broadway's Garrick Theater in the winter of 1922-23.

After an early teaching stint at the University of Chicago, Booth taught at Haverford and Earlham Colleges before returning to the University as the George M. Pullman Professor of English in 1962, a position he would hold for nearly three decades (though continuing to teach on occasion even in his 80s). Just prior to his appointment, Booth published The Rhetoric of Fiction, a work which considers the literary text in light of both author and audience, applying Aristotelian theory and concepts to advanced discussions of how we make sense of the fictional form. For generations of scholars, the terms Booth advanced in order to analyze complex orders of showing and telling—the "implied author," for example, or the "postulated reader"—became commonplace components of the critical lexicon.

Čapek didn't credit himself with coining the word that became "robot"—instead, in an article printed in Lidové noviny (first articulated in response to the Oxford English Dictionary's etymology), he attributed the word's origins to his brother Josef. Karel had initially wanted to use the Latin word for "labor," rather than Josef's suggestion of robota, which literally translates from the Czech as "serfdom" or "drudgery," and connects to a traditional literature filled with Golem-like creatures.

Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction produced two editions, was translated into seven languages, and won awards from the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the National Council of Teachers of English, among other accolades. Booth continued to publish works of enormous influence on narrative theory and literary studies, including A Rhetoric of Irony, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, The Vocation of a Teacher, The Knowledge Most Worth Having, and several editions of The Craft of Research. Booth also championed teaching and collegiality, serving as Dean of the College from 1964 to 1969, helping to moderate unrest during the Vietnam War period. He coedited Critical Inquiry for many years; delivered one of the University's Ryerson lectures; was awarded Guggenheim, NEH, and Ford Faculty Fellowships; served for one year as the president of the Modern Language Association; and was recognized by the American Association for Higher Education as one of six professors who made "a difference in higher education." To this day, the University hands out the Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in his honor.

Čapek countered the adaptation of Robota in his play's title, and in a gesture toward those titular entities (which were not mechanical, as in our modern sense of the word, but instead biological beings early mistaken for humans), included the name Rossum, which alludes to the Czech word rozum, meaning—naturally—"wisdom" or "intellect."

Booth's legacy as a top-tier scholar, both in terms of technical skill and ethical perspective, and teacher is nearly without peer. We remember him today, in light of other benign anniversaries, on what would have been his ninetieth birthday, as one who helped us wrestle with what it meant to be the opposite of Čapek's robot—a bit more fully human.

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Reference and Writing
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Full confession: it's Yoko Ono's birthday. In a Fluxus-inspired riff, we cribbed knowledge of the odd science that follows below first from the Atlantic and then from Drew Grant's piece at Salon. Part of a much bigger trend (we use trend skeptically since this sort of thing—video games, the a-r-t remix—has been around at least since the early days of artist-hackers like Cory Arcangel and SF Moma's 2001 exhibition "ArtCade: Exploring the Relationship Between Video Games and Art"), repurposing new technology (digital coding) in order to transform older technologies (Atari- and Nintendo-inspired video game cartridges) into faux cultural artifacts seems to be all the rage.

What got us excited? Old school video game adaptations of The Great Gatsby and Waiting for Godot, naturally. As one writer opined, it's a particular type of nerd that feels elated at choosing between the Vladimir and Estragon avatars (was "avatar" part of the terminology from the Frogger years?). But there's a certain euphoria (or better: eunoia) experienced in navigating a pint-sized Nick Carraway through Level 1: Gatsby's Party, even if the adaptation only skims the surface scenery of the book. Why, we wonder, is this?

Edward Castronova pioneered the study of virtual gaming in Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Gaming (interview here), offering perspective on the social culture and synthetic world economics involved. But these games aren't world-creating in the same way; they speak to fans of the literature (as do the game adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, and others) or those fascinated by the interstices of high-tech/low-tech digital arts. Seemingly driven in part by nostalgia for simplicity and in part by cultural capital, games like The Great Gatsby fall into one of the digital humanities' new great new divides: art meet science meet a time machine.

Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover's new collection Switching Codes: Thinking through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts excavates this complex terrain. Contributors—including Bruno Latour, Charles Bernstein, Alain Liu, and Richard Powers—employ a variety of forms (among them: game design) to consider the precipitous growth of digital information over the past half century has transformed how we think and act in our increasingly mediated age. Switching Codes address the cognitive gap between IT specialists and scholars, both of them utilizing and making sense of technology, while using language and skill sets not necessarily complimentary to each other. In the face of all of this, new criteria emerges.

Just this past Wednesday, the Globe and Mail previewed the Smithsonian Museum of American Art's forthcoming exhibition "The Art of Video Games," noting:

[T]he museum wants to centre the exhibit "on visual effects and the creative use of new technologies." We're not being asked to elect our favourite games, but rather those that were most visually compelling and technologically innovative for their time (the selections have been divvied up into five eras). That means conscientiously selecting between a couple of games like Disney Epic Mickey, which delivered mediocre play but offered up some amazingly authentic interactive versions of 70 year-old cartoons, and Super Mario Galaxy 2, which had great play scenarios but didn't advance the graphical bar much beyond its predecessor, isn't as cut and dry as you might think.

Are video games inherently art? Is a forward-moving technology part of the criteria with which we should evaluate their appeal—and success? And what to make of an odd duck like The Great Gatsby game, with its out-of-date technology and literary underpinning? The Medium was Tedium, certainly. But in this case: maybe the Mediated was Appreciated?

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | Literature
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February: lovesick and lambs-wooled. We call you fair of face, fleet of foot (only 28 days, after all), foxy, Phlox Lombardi'd, and inclined to repeatedly listen to Jonathan Richman and the airing of grievances. Black History Month ushers you in, while Gilbert Gottfried's birthday Bears you Down. Amid all this, the bell tolls for thee: februum, after all, means "purification." Chinese New Year goes ka-ka-ka-kat and our presidents are remembered for birth or pluck. What luck, February, grand dame of winter. We'll take your lead and . . . turn to Southern California.

With all that in mind, let us proclaim February the month of a free ebook: Who Wrote the Book of Love?, Lee Siegel's fictional ode to an erotic coming of age.

"Part of my plan," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked." With the same motive, Lee Siegel has written what Twain might have composed had he been Jewish, raised in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and joyously obsessed with sex and love.

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"Hilarious. . . . A delicious, page-turning memoir that spans those doctor-playing, sex-obsessed, hormone-drenched years from 5 to 15. It's witty, warm, terribly sweet in places, and there's never a dull moment on any single page. . . . Who Wrote the Book of Love? is not for the drear puritan. Yes, this charming book with so many laugh-out-loud sections, with its incurable nostalgia for youthful folly, is full of dirty thoughts, words, and deeds. But I wonder if a more innocent book has been written lately."—Chicago Tribune

In Who Wrote the Book of Love?, Siegel pens the tender tale of Love under the Sign of McCarthyism, replete with a Pat Boone soundtrack and a healthy mix of adolescent sexual hijinks and fear of nuclear annihilation (online excerpt available here). In keeping with Chicago's monthly ebook promotion, until February 28th, you have the opportunity to download this "novel" volume, praised by Time Out Chicago, Booklist, and Penn Jillette, for free.

"We were young," Augusten Burroughs began. "We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover."

No matter how you choose to remember your childhood, we can't endorse Who Wrote the Book of Love? enough as perfect fodder for this month of purifying rituals, wilderness survival plans, and possible psychiatric measures.

Download your copy today.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature | UCP News
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On the heels of last night's State of the Union speech, which saw President Obama addressing a newly divided Congress, and amid the varied responses, rebuttals, and interpretations that have emerged, we asked Sandra M. Gustafson, author of the forthcoming Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic to weigh in on how deliberation was shaping the current political climate. Gustafson digs deep into Obama's rhetoric, connecting it to several speeches written during his presidential tenure, as well as early Congressional debates that shaped our civic discourse, nineteenth-century American literature, and the recent events in Tucson. Read Gustafson's compelling take below:

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In a recent op-ed published by the New York Times, Joanne B. Freeman provides a chilling background for reports that, in the wake of the Tucson shootings earlier this month, several lawmakers planned to begin carrying guns. Freeman's article relates the little-known story of the violence that disrupted Congressional debates in the years leading up to the Civil War. In those years legislators threatened and sometimes attacked one another with guns, knives, and canes. But there is another and more hopeful side to this history.

James Madison championed deliberation as a central feature of the government created by the United States Constitution, and in the years after the nation's founding many writers and public figures worked to make the ideal of deliberation into a reality. No public figure contributed more to this effort than Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, who in his speeches to Congress repeatedly returned to the ideals of republican self-governance that Americans of his day associated with Cicero. These efforts became more urgent following the election of Andrew Jackson, who for the first time brought frontier culture into the White House. Best known for embodying a particular version of American democracy (one identified with giving white men the vote regardless of property qualifications), Jackson also contributed to a political climate of conflict and violence that was most apparent in the removal of Native Americans from their homeland and the escalating tensions over slavery.

Webster's effort to make American civic discourse increasingly deliberative is nowhere more apparent than in an 1830 speech known as the Second Reply to Hayne—an address that continued to be widely taught in American schools well into the twentieth century and that has long been celebrated for its ringing proclamation, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" The Webster-Hayne debates in the Senate involved competing regional alliances, economic programs, and interpretations of the federal system. Both sides of the debate claimed to be perpetuating the values of the nation's founders. As a proponent of Henry Clay's American System, Webster argued that public lands should be administered for the good of the nation. He criticized Hayne and by implication, Hayne's fellow South Carolinian, Vice President John Calhoun, the major exponent of nullification, for putting local interests over national ones. Like Calhoun, Hayne argued for a loose and soluble federal system which gave priority to discrete local needs, such as the protection and expansion of slavery, and did not attempt to manufacture a vision of the good of the whole.

Webster put particular emphasis in his address on the deteriorating conditions of debate generated by the nullification movement. He charged that over the previous two days, Hayne had touched on a wide array of topics with the single exception of the public lands—to which he had "not paid even the cold respect of a passing glance." Not only had Hayne been disrespectful to the Senate by ignoring the subject of the resolution, he had been rude to Webster personally, refusing his northern colleague's request to delay the debate because Hayne had "something rankling" in his heart and because "he had a shot . . . to return, and he wished to discharge it." Webster mocked Hayne's rhetorical violence, observing that "if nobody is found, after all, either killed or wounded, it is not the first time, in the history of human affairs, that the vigor and success of the war have not quite come up to the lofty and sounding phrase of the manifesto." He then contrasted Hayne's anger toward him with his own even temper and respectful treatment of his colleague. The Senate, Webster continued with a rising emphasis, is "a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence. We know no masters, we acknowledge no dictators." The floor of the Senate was not the arena for rhetorical contests but "a hall for mutual consultation and discussion." Throughout his lengthy address Webster repeatedly criticized Hayne for fostering "party abuse and frothy violence" and for claiming that the Democratic Party to which he belonged was "the true Pure, the only honest, patriotic party."

Webster further contested Hayne's interpretation of the Constitution, which held that state legislatures could declare federal laws unconstitutional. In this view, the federal government was based upon a compact and thus was not a national state in the full sense of the term. Webster insisted that the sovereign people, and not the states, authorize the federal government. In a famous passage that Abraham Lincoln later echoed in the Gettysburg Address, Webster insisted that "It is, Sir, the people's Constitution, the people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people." Nullification theory destroyed the Constitution, undermining the government until it became merely "a collection of topics for everlasting controversy; heads of debate for a disputatious people." Webster explained the nullifiers' capacity to reduce the federal government to powerlessness as a function of the way the human mind is constituted. In a controversy, Webster suggested, both sides of the argument appear "very clear, and very palpable, to those who respectively espouse them; and both sides usually grow clearer as the controversy advances." Webster warned that extreme polarization of the sort fostered by Hayne's militarist rhetoric would lead to the real violence that Freeman describes.

Webster was not the only voice calling for more mutually respectful public debates. Such appeals occurred in unexpected places, such as the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans, which appeared just four years before Webster's speech, contains plenty of violence, but it also includes a great many scenes of respectful consultation and thoughtful decision making, notably between Natty Bumppo and his Delaware companions. Cooper bluntly observes of one such scene that "the most decorous christian [sic] assembly," even a collection of "reverend ministers," "might have learned a wholesome lesson of moderation from the forbearance and courtesy of the disputants." Another frontier voice, that of David Crockett, used humor rather than violence as a means to challenge opponents, showing how it could be used to create strong social bonds that foster the common good. When Crockett served as Representative from Tennessee, he publicly broke with Jackson over his land and Indian policies and allied himself with Daniel Webster and his associates. The words of Webster, Cooper, and Crockett offer a striking reflection on the road not taken in the political struggle over national expansion and slavery.

The State of the Union speech last night moved the United States further down the road toward the civil and deliberate politics that Webster and others envisioned. Recoiling from the violence in Tucson, rather than brandishing guns at one another, many legislators chose to sit with members of the other party in an effort to foster greater comity in what has been an unusually polarized Congress. Observers noted the change that this seating arrangement made in the tone of the event, which was less boisterous and partisan, more thoughtful and deliberate than in years past. President Obama contributed to that tone by stressing the themes of civility and consensus-building which have characterized his political message since he rose to national attention with his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, where he memorably said "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America." The proposals in his speech last night drew from both liberal and conservative agendas in a pragmatist effort to elicit the best ideas from both sides to most effectively address national concerns.

It was in this spirit that he opened his speech with an echo of the 2004 address that launched his national career, as well as with an acknowledgment of his moving tribute to Christina Taylor Green, the nine-year-old victim of the Tucson shootings, whose family sat in the gallery next to Michelle Obama:

"We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled."

This description of a national family, and the subtle reference to a young girl's untimely death, allude to another classic work from the antebellum United States: Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), in which Little Eva dies because of her deep attunement to the sufferings of the slaves, which, she says, sink into her heart.

This is not the first time that the president's rhetoric has evoked Stowe's novel. In the conclusion to "A More Perfect Union," his speech on race in America delivered in March 2008, Obama told the story of a young campaign worker named Ashley whose commitment attracted an elderly black man. The story of this unlikely pair resonates with the powerful connection between Little Eva and Uncle Tom. As Obama noted then, "that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children." The civil and deliberate tone that Congress and the President set at the State of the Union address will not by itself solve the national problems that he outlined. But the moment of recognition of a shared set of goals can help foster the spirit of cooperation and compromise with which it is necessary to begin.

Sandra M. Gustafson is a professor of English and American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic will appear this spring from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Literature | Politics and Current Events
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We must admit that a recent blog post by Press author Andrew Piper (whose Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age garnered this year's MLA First Book Prize and generated a rich Booklog of related ephemera) on automated friendships has us thinking.

Piper, who specializes in the intersection of bibliographic and literary communication, from the eighteenth century forward, posted an anticipatory take on Web 3.0 (which, you might argue, may or may not have already arrived) and whether or not the quality of "friendship" will ultimately qualify the information we take in from the socially hotwired interweb.

In light of Chuck Klosterman's recent NYT's piece "My Zombie, Myself: How Modern Life Feels Rather Undead" ("The internet reminds us of this everyday"), Piper frames our contemporary dilemma:

But when you have 500 friends, or follow on average 400 twitter streams per day, is friendship still the best category to think about reading and the exchange of information? The push to make the selectivity of information more automated—algorithms of aggregation, much like Amazon does now with book titles—is likely to show up soon in the world of social networking. It raises the interesting question: what kind of sociability is quantified sociability? "Calculation" of course was precisely the value that was not supposed to belong to "friendship."

Interesting stuff. Though we're not entirely certain if digital finesse is the appropriate conduit to rehumanize our relationships (are we already post-apocalypse?), the thought that there's a paradox at work between emotional and technological intimacy (and their varied returns) is enough to make us a bit more alert when The Waking Dead finally shows up in our automated Netflix on Demand preferences—

"Suspenseful Dark TV Shows that Engender Debate about whether or not Modern Life is a Limit Experience."

To keep up with all things Andrew Piper, check out The Book Report here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Literature
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Have you heard about our free e-book of the month? We've already Danced with Anthony Powell, schooled our Bourgeois Virtues, and even evaluated the Best of Roger Ebert.

January, christened by Janus, the god of the doorway, what a cruel and miserly Home Depot construction project you've turned out to be! Inches of snow, bolting us over into the new year on January 1, the Feast of the Circumcision (I could not make this up). Wulf-monath! Wolf month! I wait for your Burns Night (January 25th) and ponder a month sanctioned National Thank You. No, no: thank you.

In the midst of this, seeking the companionship of a book, I look for verse or reckoning:

The English critic William Empson's insight into pastoral is that the need to invent untroubled perfection always springs from anxiety: from suppressed loathing or dread. The dream of ease may be a denial of the nightmare, and therefore by implication a shadowy acknowledgment of it. In a culture notionally built on speed, change, mobility, and expansion, the thought of a quiet, human-scale community has been comforting—a half-real, half-invented shelter, refusing to explode under the successive historical pressures of slavery, economic depression, European war, technological change, imperial enterprises, and global missions, all the violent contradictions of clinging to a complacent provinciality while hurtling forward into the modern, the postmodern, or whatever comes after that.

Join me in downloading our free ebook for January: Robert Pinsky's Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town (available through January 31st).

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Pinsky offers a provocative take on the relationship between artists and small-town America. He explicates quotations from Cather, Faulkner and Twain, as well as scenes from filmmakers like Hitchcock and Sturges, and reminiscences about his own upbringing in Long Branch, NJ.—New York Times Book Review

Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did. . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator, than Robert Pinsky.—Nation

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Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature | Publicity | UCP News
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Certainly one of the most involved discussions at the recent annual meeting of the Modern Language Association was the continued emergence and changing role of the digital humanities. From blockbuster panels and papers on an array of topics to summaries in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Twitter feed responses, we've just barely scratched the surface of some of the conversations that might introduce a digital humanities newbie to the wealth of exchanges that happened this past weekend, alongside a couple of new announcements made in the conference's wake.

What follows is an assortment of clips that have come through our wires, marking our own foray into readings that extend beyond ThatCamp basics and Chicago's own list in this burgeoning interest area. By no means exhaustive, this is a collection of moments that caught our attention, as the internet flickered in the days following our return from M(LA).

If you don't know what the digital humanities is, you haven't looked very hard.—Matthew Kirschenbaum, author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, which won the MLA's First Book Award in 2009

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I know from experience that there are plenty of people in the profession who know little about this established field and even regard it with disdain as something disturbingly outré and dangerous to the mission of the humanities.—William Pannapacker, "Pannapacker at MLA: Digital Humanities Triumphant?"

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Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2011 MLA:

12. Labor in the Digital Humanities
19. Digging into Data: Computational Methods of Literary Research
29. The Brave New World of Scholarly Books: Publishing in Tempestuous Times
45. Getting Funded in the Humanities: A National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Workshop
48. Hacking the Profession: Academic Self-Help in an Age of Crisis
52. E-Books as Bibliographical Objects
91. Meeting in the Library: Academic Labor at the Interface
125. Literary Research and Digital Humanities
140. What Is College Level Writing in the Twenty-First Century?
141. New Thresholds of Interpretation? Paratexts in the Digital Age
150. New Tools, Hard Times: Social Networking and the Academic Crisis
185. Planet Wiki? Postcolonial Theory, Social Media, and Web 2.0
193. New (and Renewed) Work in Digital Literary Studies: An Electronic Roundtable
218. Analog and Digital: Texts, Contexts, and Networks
233. Transmedia Activism
248. The Dictionary in Print and in the Cloud
282. Paper as Platform or Interface
296. Technology-Enhanced Delivery Models in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching
305. Silent Night: The Archives of the Deaf and Blind
309. The History and Future of the Digital Humanities
331. The Open Professoriat: Public Intellectuals on the Social Web
349. From N-Town to YouTube: Medieval Drama on Film, Video, and the Web
385. Endangered Languages, Language Documentation, and Digital Humanities
397. The Lives That Digital Archives Write
431. Textual Scholarship and New Media
436. The Institution(alization) of Digital Humanities
462. Foreign Language Cultural Literacy and Web 2.0
474. Social Networking: Web 2.0 Applications for the Teaching of Languages and Literatures
493. The Archive and the Aesthetic: Methodologies of American Literary Studies
505. Lives and Archives in Graphic and Digital Modes
521. Close Reading the Digital
532. Electronic Lives
541. Electronic Literature: Off the Screen
577. Print Culture and Undergraduate Literary Study
596. Will Publications Perish? The Paradigm Shift in Scholarly Communication
606. Methods of Research in New Media
617. Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) and the Scholarly Edition
619. Ecocriticism beyond Literature
639. Where's the Pedagogy in Digital Pedagogy?
743. What the Digital Does to Reading
752. Literature and/as New Media
753. Sustainable Publishing
792. Sound Reproduction and the Literary

Archive taken from Mark Sample's updated Sample Reality repost on hastac.org

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If in flux in the age of digital technologies are the roles of instructor and intellectual, and the methods and formats of scholarship, so too are the very objects of study.—excerpt from "Digital Humanities at the 2011 MLA Convention," published by the University of California, Berkeley's Townsend Humanities Center

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4Humanities began because the digital humanities community—which specializes in making creative use of digital technology to advance humanities research and teaching as well as to think about the basic nature of the new media and technologies—woke up to its special potential and responsibility to assist humanities advocacy.—from the mission statement of 4Humanities: Advocating for the Humanities, cited in a paper by Alan Liu ("Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?")

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If you don't begin with the assumption that literature itself is a repository of human values that human beings need, then we lose everything.—Professor Donald Pease, Dartmouth College, quoted in a Los Angeles Times article about MLA and the "low-plateau" of the job market for humanities scholars

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'Everyone is rushing now to announce,' Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, said via email. He has been involved in the planning conversations behind some of the new ventures. 'The good news, I think, is that the e-transition for the institutional market is clearly—and finally—at escape velocity.' —from Jennifer Howard's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the recent announcement of Books at JSTOR and other ebook publishing platforms

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An analysis of the 7,649 tweets with the hash tag "#mla11":

80% (6119) of the tweets in this TwapperKeeper archive were made by 13% (115) of the twitterers.

The top 10 (1%) twitterers account for 38% (2915) of the tweets.

50% (428) of the twitterers only tweeted once.

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Community and collaboration are undoubtedly signs of the spirit, but to say that disciplinary definition doesn't really matter is to eschew the hard reality of life in the modern academy. Digital Humanities is not some airy Lyceum. It is a series of concrete instantiations involving money, students, funding agencies, big schools, little schools, programs, curricula, old guards, new guards, gatekeepers, and prestige. It might be more than these things, but it cannot not be these things.—Stephen Ramsey, excerpt from "Who's In and Who's Out," a paper presented at the History and Future of the Digital Humanities panel

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Early odds on the digital humanities 'arriving' at #mla12 are 1/100—tweet archived by lwaltzer on January 10th

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Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Literature
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Manmoth can't really be dead, can he?

But Manmoth died in the autumn:

DEATH OF OSCAR WILDE; He Expires at an Obscure Hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Is Said to Have Died from Meningitis, but There Is a Rumor that He Committed Suicide.

What love best about Manmoth? (A Top Five or Ten list of minutiae that will eventually come round to the critic and his work, in publication)

Fingal O'Flahertie Wills as middle names (older brother Willie Wilde—a real, as if imagined, alliterative sibling—and two half-sisters burned to death in an accident triggered by one dancing too close to a coal fire)

deep appreciation for peacock feathers as decorative accoutrement; also: blue china and lilies (and lectures during his 1882 American tour on the history of interior design)

Names of periodicals at which he played an editorial role: the Pall Mall Gazette; the Lady's World, later the Woman's World; and the Chameleon (limited run)

choice of architecturally tectonic (as if GPS) coordinates for the publication name associated with The Ballad of Reading Gaol—C33 (cell block C, landing 3, cell 3)

the fascinating etymology of the word "dude," (c. 1883) in which (depending on the source) Wilde plays a role as progenitor, coiner, inspiration, or exemplar

From the Brooklyn Eagle (25 February 1883):

A new word has been coined. It is d-u-d-e or d-o-o-d. The spelling does not seem to be distinctly settled yet. Just where the word came from nobody knows, but it has sprung into popularity in the last two weeks, so that now everybody is using it. A dude cannot be old; he must be young, and to be properly termed a dude he should be of a certain class who affect Metropolitan theaters. The dude is from 19 to 28 years of age, wears trousers of extreme tightness, is hollow chested, effeminate in his ways, apes the English and distinguishes himself among his fellowmen as a lover of actresses. The badge of his office is the paper cigarette, and his bell crown English opera hat is his chiefest (sic) joy.

But minor delights aside: Manmoth lingers in witty epigrams, sharp-toothed dramas dressed up in social etiquette, and as a major figure in both aesthetics and the history of criticism. Just this past weekend, the New York Times devoted a significant portion of their Book Review to lit crit's current manifestations ("Why Criticism Matters"), with thoughtful pieces by rising stars like Elif Batuman and Sam Anderson. Wilde appeared in the usual dapper photograph in a section on Masters of the Form, which hailed Manmoth alongside Eliot and Matthew Arnold (many Wolverines on Dover Beach these days?), among others. Here, the Times sampled "The Critic as Artist," one of the pieces published by Chicago in The Artist as Critic: Critical Wrings of Oscar Wilde.

"Wilde . . . emerges now as not only brilliant but also revolutionary, one of the great thinkers of dangerous thoughts."—Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review

This essay, like many by Wilde in this collection, has been taken to heart (and put to memory) by many, despite the recent celebration of its 120th birthday. "To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes." What remains special about this book, though, even more so than the writings of Wilde is Richard Ellman's editorial hand. Winner of a posthumous National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his Oscar Wilde (1989, and still the standard life), Ellman was also embraced by writer Edna O'Brien as the only person who conquered Finnegans Wake and "digested the whole of it."

Much of the Times piece on criticism's future seemed to be trying to articulate the uncertain remains of liberal humanism. Richard Ellman was one of its twentieth-century faces and his work on Wilde one of the triumphs of his career. It made for compelling reading to juxtapose vintage soundbites from the masters alongside those important new critical geographies, but if you're curious about those "whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the [critical] gem," Ellman's collection is worth revisiting.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Literature
Posted by KAM at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three-day weekend: fin! We're back with a vengeance today: and by vengeance, we mean filled with admiration and applause for Robert K. Elder's piece on the approaching 150th anniversary of the largest mass execution in US history, which appeared in this morning's New York Times. Elder, author of Last Words of the Executed (a sample of excerpts here), profiles the fate of the thirty-eight doomed Dakota Indians executed that day, including one story of mistaken identity, and updates us with the possible case for federal pardon. Spot-on narrative coverage of a historical issue with lingering repercussions for our own heated debate on capital punishment, we say. Congrats, again, Mr. Elder.

In other news, we've been poring over the 124-page transcript from Senator Bernie Sanders's filibuster this past Friday. Galleycat already ran with a well-researched piece on all of the references Sanders made to books in his eight-and-a-half-hour-long speech (plus excerpts!) filibustering the tax deal shaped by Congressional Republicans and President Obama. With that post as inspiration, we thought to Top Five or Ten this, in tribute to Senator Sanders's verbal endurance and in spirited promotion of books we think he might squeeze in as holiday reading before the next round:

Top Five or Ten: Books we'll be sending to Senator Sanders in the hopes he'll find time to read them before the next contentious bipartisan debate requires a prolific speech act

Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum's translations of Seneca in Anger, Mercy, Revenge

Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and statesman, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. In Anger, Mercy, Revenge, Kaster and Nussbaum deftly translate three key writings, two of which were penned as advice for the young emperor, Nero. The third? The Apocolocyntosis, an artful satire lampooning the end of the reign of Claudius. Who better to champion an eight-hour speech than a Stoic, we ask? Read an excerpt here.

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George William Van Cleve's A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic

Van Cleve convincingly shows that the Constitutional provisions protecting slavery were much more than another mere "political" compromise—they were integral to the principles of the new nation. By the late 1780s, a majority of Americans wanted to create a strong federal republic that would be capable of expanding into a continental empire and in order for America to become an empire on such a scale, Van Cleve argues, the Southern states had to be willing partners in the endeavor. The cost of their allegiance? The deliberate long-term protection of slavery by America's leaders through the nation's early expansion. MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award-winner Annette Gordon-Reed calls the book "a dazzling addition to scholarship."

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Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer's Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom of the Low-Wage Labor Market

An in-depth study of the working poor in the midwestern United States, Both Hands Tied tackles the plight of working women in light of a gendered change in the labor market, welfare reform, and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state. Sanders might first read Carl Chancellor's insightful post about the book on Change.org's Poverty in America blog here.

**

Marjorie Perloff's Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media

Perloff's negotiation between poetic and media discourses has much to offer a would-be filibusterer. The natural speech of Phil Donahue versus the natural speech of modernism? Check. Written under "the sign" of John Cage, the artist behind one of our best-known acts of silence? Check. We really should make this a two-in-one and include Perloff's Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, which brilliantly posits how citation became a form of literary discourse.

**

Gregory Koger's Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate

We end with our most obvious candidate—the go-to history for how and why obstruction has been institutionalized by the US Senate over the past fifty years, and how its transformation continues to affect politics and policymaking. Hailed by everyone from the New York Review of Books to the Washington Post, Filibustering is great tactical reading for Sanders and its smart red cover makes it an apt object to wave on the Senate floor.

**

Right, Mr. Smith?

Archived in Books for the News | History | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1883, an interdisciplinary advocacy group promoting the study of literature and modern languages was founded at Johns Hopkins University. In its one-hundred and twenty-seven year run, the Modern Language Association has grown to include more than 30,000 members in over 100 countries, fostered several major publications and a serialized radio show, and survived the changing mores and face of the academy ("Watch for our posters and leaflets!"—from a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books in 1968 from Noam Chomsky, Frederick Crews, Florence Howe, and others, as to how the '68 MLA meeting in NYC might work to make the organization more responsive to society—part of a fascinating exchange available here).

One-hundred and twenty-seven years, though, is nothing to laugh at—and neither is the high regard with which the organization's annual awards for book-length scholarship are held. Notices went out via the interweb yesterday and we couldn't be more thrilled for several of our authors, who'll be further commended at the 2011 annual meeting this January in Los Angeles.

Laura Dassow Walls, author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, garnered the forty-first annual James Russell Lowell Prize for "an outstanding literary or linguistic study by a member of the academy." Walls traces von Humboldt's ideas for Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where von Humboldt first envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link discourses and nations in a global web of community. Check out the excerpt available at the book's UCP page here and have a look at what Science called "a heartfelt plea for environmental holism."

Jane Tylus will share the twenty-first annual Howard R. Marraro Prize for "outstanding book in the field of Italian Literature" for Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others, which Choice earlier proclaimed an "essential" volume.

Andrew Piper, whose Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination we just blogged about yesterday afternoon, received the seventeenth annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book for this work on the book's changing identity at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as acclaim from the New Republic for one of the Best Art Books of 2009.

And finally: Eric Slauter, author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution—in which he uncovers the hidden cultural histories upon which the document rests, in light of the artifice of the developing state—received Honorable Mention for the First Book award. Read an excerpt from the first chapter of The State as a Work of Art at the BookDaily site here.

Hearty congrats and warm weekend wishes to all of the winners!

Archived in Awards | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
Posted by KAM at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If I were Cassandra and someone had asked me as an adolescent what noble passions would come to define the end of my twenties, I would have answered with certainty: the reading of encyclopedic novels, twentieth-century nostalgia, and the television series thirtysomething. And like C, I would have been doomed to disbelieve myself. I could have gone on and on about a world gone digital (now 3.0); electronic books; the decline and fall of James Frey and orange Crocs; FREE ELECTRONIC BOOKS; and the University of Chicago Press ebook release of all twelve volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series, beginning with our free December ebook (Volume 1!), A Question of Upbringing.

Here, Cassandra hits the trifecta. There are encyclopedic novels and then there is A Dance to the Music of Time, a series so macrocosmic in scope that it makes the legendary 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica seem a minor tome. There are the intersecting and changing lives and stories informed by minutiae and banal realities that inflect thirtysomething and then there is Dance. And there's this minor epoch—the twentieth century. Pales in comparison to Dance.

We're talking Modern Library's Top 100 Novels, Time's Best 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century, James Wolcott-endorsed, Terry Teachout-fanned, Ed Park-supported, monumentally hypnotic reading.

This is tremendously exciting stuff—the University of Chicago Press is releasing each book in the series electronically and the first volume is free not just on our own website, but on the Kindle, Nook, Borders, and Sony sites. In addition, we're discounting the full Dance collection, with all books (both electronic and print versions) available at a 30% discount on our website (use the promo code DANCE30). Can you think of a more engrossing winter teaser? A more enviable New Year's achievement? Your Dance-card is full.

Our own publicity manager Levi Stahl, reader and re-reader of Dance, has written many an eloquent ode to the series, including this hilariously prosaic post at Maud Newton's site in imitation of Powell's own idiom. He's already pointedly hooked us with literary raconteur Jonathan Ames's take:

Jeeves and I were reading together, as a sort of two-person book club, Anthony Powell's epic, twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time. It's absolutely a stupendous work—almost nothing of moment occurs for hundreds of page, thousands, even, and yet one reads on completely mesmerized. It's like an imprint of life: nothing happens and yet everything happens.

Jonathan, are you out there someplace listening? Let's do this together—you and I and Jeeves, some of us for the first time and some again and again:

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Literature
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"Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together."

In with a comet, out with a comet: Halley's, that is. For elementary students, the life of Mark Twain is first introduced as celestial; later, with adolescent reads of that "great American novel" The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, our humorist falls back to earth, where his larger-than-life sensibilities, rich use of narrative, and social critique sharply attuned to human vanity, frailty, and hypocrisy, introduce a particular breed of American pathos. Beyond the work—which spans everything from colloquial verse and travelogues to historical fiction running the gamut from realist-inspired to proto-science—is, of course, the life. Mark Twain died on April 21, 1910, and in keeping with his wishes, just this fall the University of California Press released the first volume of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, in celebration of that centenary. But as the New York Times reports this weekend, demand has far exceeded expectation for the surprise best-seller: and as we approach the holiday gift-giving season, booksellers are struggling to keep it on the shelves.

"Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else."

Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's laboratory, 1894

If you count yourself among Twain aficionados (full disclosure: I am one of you!) and find yourself fretting in search of a copy, don't despair. Part of the beauty of Twain's autobiography, as any amateur Twainian or anyone familiar with the University of California, Berkeley's astounding Mark Twain Project Online might let you know, is that the book is non-chronological and ever so slightly absurdist. But to reap the riches Twain touches upon in his final years—his involvement with the Society for Psychical Research; his battles with serious depression; and his friendships (and feuds) with paupers, monarchs, and Standard Oil executives alike (his loathing of George Eliot! his fascination with Joan of Arc!) —why not read the biography that the New Republic calls "one of the most reliable and readable books in the whole huge library of Twain biographical studies"? Hamlin Hill's Mark Twain: God's Fool embraces Twain's difficult last years with candor and verve, charting the personal tragedies and questionable business decisions that marked the author's final decade.

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

Want to dig deeper into how this manifested in Twain's work? Susan Gillman's Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America plucks the confidence men, disguised characters, and assumed identities from Twain's pages and plunks them down alongside the laws regulating race classification, paternity, and cases of rape that underwrote much of Twain's writings in the 1890s and onward. Here spiritualism's "pseudoscience" and the birth of modern psychology provide the complex cultural vocabularies essential to the last two decades of Twain's work.

Humble suggestions from the Chicago Blog about our humble chronicler of good humor and that new American anxiety—and no matter your thoughts, we're geeked to share this brilliant clip, in inspiration. Shot by Thomas Edison at Twain's Connecticut estate Stormfield in 1909, it features Twain playing cards with his daughters and combing the hallowed grounds—like Mark Twain: God's Fool and Dark Twins, it's not to be missed:

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Commentary | Literature
Posted by KAM at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And with this whimsical title, we introduce a new Chicago Blog feature: the Top Five or Ten, a collection of materials occasionally preceding eleven and following nine—the Fermat prime, if you will, or the, um, bell that tolls multiple times for thee—geared for a day when you need a bit of neurotic listmaking in your life. Sometimes we double your pleasure ("Ten") and other times we streamline your attention span ("Five"). That said, let's inaugurate, shall we?

On the heels of Patricia Cohen's well-charted NYT piece on the digital humanities and Press author Dan Edelstein's forward-thinking response, we'd like to point you towards five wholly relevant recent books that chart these brave new methodologies and help us to make sense of developments in the liberal arts and their bright digital future:

Drumroll, please (and in no particular order):

Lydia H. Liu's The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (forthcoming, January 2011) Liu's book offers a rigorous study of the politics of digital writing and their fateful entanglement with Mr. Freud, from avant-garde literary experiments to the postphonetic and ideographic system of digital media. #literary theory #cybernetics #Joyce #neurotic machines

N. Katherine Hayles's My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
We've been fortunate to publish four books by Hayles, and this, her most recent, doesn't disappoint that brilliant lineage: it considers the generative relationships between programming code and language, and the complex bearings we use to locate ourselves in age of what she coins intermediation (online excerpt available here!). #cultural practices #William Blake archive #Standard Generalized Markup Language

Alan Liu's Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database
Local Transcendence puts postmodern cultural criticism and digital information technology to task in this collection of essays inflected with the new methodologies of media history. #postindustrial theory #synthetics #Remembering the Spruce Goose

Richard A. Lanham's The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (excerpt and author interview online here and here, respectively) A pathbreaking look at the transition from an economy of things to an economy of attention, Lanham's book anoints a new set of moguls: masters whose grounding comes from the data-rich humanities and liberal arts, rather than MBA programs. #audits #computer science #rhetorical commodities

And last but not least: Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover's Switching Codes: Thinking through New Technology in the Humanities and the Arts (forthcoming March 2011) An all-star cast of contributors (Bruno Latour and Richard Powers, among them) employing a staggering array of forms (fiction, dialogue, criticism, and even game design) examines how the precipitous growth of digital information and its technologies are transforming the ways we think and act (check out a recent conference at Bard College devoted to the subject here). #IT specialists and scholars #technocultural life #excited about this one

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Literature | UCP News
Posted by KAM at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The September 14th issue of the London Review of Books features an extended, combative review by Elif Batuman of a recent book from Harvard University Press, Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Though Batuman takes issue with many of McGurl's points, her essay is the sort of review any author ought to be happy to get, one that takes the book seriously enough to engage deeply with its ideas.

Ultimately, however, Batuman is simply much more critical of university writing programs and the fiction they've spawned than McGurl is, arguing, among other things, that their ahistorical approach to fiction is a short-sighted, narcissistic mistake. "Literary scholarship," writes Batuman, "may not be an undiluted joy to its readers, but at least it's usually founded on an ideal of the collaborative accretion of human knowledge."

Batuman's essay brought to mind one of our books, D. G. Myers's The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880, which takes a longer view than McGurl's book, surveying and analyzing more than a century of debate over how—and even whether—creative writing should be taught. Myers draws on a wide range of writers—including Longfellow, Emerson, Frost, John Berryman, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Saul Bellow—and buttresses his account with relevant background information on nineteenth-century educational theory; shifts in technology, publishing, and marketing; the growth of critical theory in this country; and the politics of higher education.

Ultimately, Myers's take, like Batuman's is highly skeptical—and in fact, at his Commonplace Blog, where he rarely seems to pull punches or hold back opinions, in a post titled bearing the unambigious title "Against Creative Writing," he wrote,

As it is now conceived and organized in the university, creative writing is not a discipline of knowledge at all. It is merely a bureaucracy for the public employment of writers and the boost­ing of English course enrollments. It has no larger purpose; or none that has been thought through.

Archived in Education | Fiction | Literature
Posted by LTS at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dad, a.k.a. Mike Royko, would have turned 78 yesterday, Sunday, September 19, and if he were still around, I would not greet him with a “Happy Birthday.”

Many people, men and women alike, especially after a “certain age,” prefer to ignore their birthdays and wish the world would too. But the rest of us prefer to ignore their wishes and gleefully rub the day in the birthday boys' and girls' faces. Hey, we all get older, so get over it, right?

Dad, though, was different. On September 19, 1979, Carol—Mom—died. He'd loved her since they were kids, married her when they were very young adults, and lost her on his 47th birthday. They had been coming up on their 25th wedding anniversary. She was 44.

And that was it for birthdays.

I might've tried a quiet, mumbled “happy birthday” one year, but the reaction, the grunt and turning-away, taught me not to try it again. So year after year, I'd try to find some excuse to stop by, either his home or down at the paper, and casually drop something off, like a book or CD, and never with any mention of why. He'd accept it with a quick “Oh, thanks,” and move on to something else. Dad probably would've preferred I'd not even done that, but the gift and lack-of-acknowledgment was my way of letting him know I hadn't forgotten what day it was, on both counts.

Those who got to know Dad in his later years often would attribute his birthday abhorrence to the usual reasons middle-aged and older guys hate them. Dad had a better reason, and the irony was that being a celebrity meant his birthday would always be noted somewhere in the media.

“Celebrating his birthday today is Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Mike Royko.”

They always got it wrong. He wasn't celebrating.

But that doesn't mean we can't, and now, it won't bug him. So Happy Birthday Dad, and as I have thought for the past 14 years, I'd be much happier ignoring it with you than saying it without you.

Love,

David

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | Literature
Posted by TXM at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the Press's unexpected bestsellers of 2000 was a little book translated from the French, The Difficulty of Being a Dog, by the novelist and essayist Roger Grenier. In the weeks following publication, as Grenier's book sold through three hardcover printings, the Press fielded phone calls from readers concerned to know more about Abby, our cover dog. Her pensive face prompted some to ask, was she OK?

Abby was not our first choice for the cover of Grenier's book. Initially we approached a well known, commercially successful fine-art photographer for permission to reprint his photograph of an even sadder-looking hound. He declined permission on the grounds that the use was too commercial. At that point the book's acquisitions editor, Alan Thomas, also a photographer, turned to his own dog, and our cover was the result. Jill Shimabukuro, the book's designer, provided two versions. The unpublished alternate—with a less oblique view of Abby—is reproduced here as well.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
Posted by LTS at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Royko in Love: Mike's Letters to Carol, the newest edition to the Press's collection of works by the award winning journalist, offers a rare look into the personal life of one of Chicago's most beloved public icons. Through his writing Royko made a reputation for himself as the prototypical hard-nosed Chicago journalist—tough, funny, acerbic, yet eloquent enough to win a Pulitzer Prize. But in Royko in Love we see another side, both sensitive and vulnerable and passionately consumed with wooing his childhood sweetheart, Carol Duckman.

Royko in Love was collected and edited by Royko's son, David Royko and over the next few days he will be making several TV appearances speak about the book and offer further insights into his father's life and career. Tonight you can catch David Royko on Fox Chicago News at 9:00 pm, tomorrow on ABC 7 Chicago News at 4:00 pm, and next week on the Tuesday edition of WTTW's Chicago Tonight and Thursday September 29 on WGN's Midday News. We'll also post the video online as it becomes available.

See also, photos of Mike and Carol Royko, with commentary by David Royko.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fans of National Book Award–winning novelist Shirley Hazzard and her late husband, Francis Steegmuller, a literary critic, translator, and biographer, are in for a treat if they can make it to New York before January 31st: the New York Society Library is featuring an exhibition of photos, manuscripts, correspondence, and literary ephemera from the couple. Given the pair's long careers, great success, and wide-ranging literary friendships and contacts, the exhibition promises to be fun for any fans of twentieth-century literature.

Us Chicago folks, of course, will be looking out in particular for any documents relating to the couple's longtime second home, Naples—the subject of the one Hazzard and Steegmuller book that we're proud to have on our list, The Ancient Shore: DIspatches from Naples. A highly literary account of a love affair with a complicated, rebarbative, but enchanting city, the book is perfect reading for late summer, when vacation is but a memory and the responsibilities of autumn loom.

“The world of Francis Steegmuller and Shirley Hazzard has been defined by high civility, grace and an enduring dedication to literature,” writes the New York Society Library. We couldn't agree more.

Archived in Biography | Literature
Posted by LTS at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Simon is off and running in the New York Times with a review of Czech novelist-in-exile-now-French-citizen and perpetually rumored Nobel Prize nominee Milan Kundera's new "essayistic" book Encounter. The collection of 26 pieces, ranging in size, provides commentary on the twentieth-century artists, writers, philosophers, filmmakers, and other cultural luminaries that Kundera champions—those who "keep beauty alive," as Simon aptly states.

The review includes some juicy bits from the book itself, including reference to the great Czech writer and advocate of the long sentence, Bonhumil Hrabal:

"A world where a person can read Hrabal is utterly different from a world where his voice could not be heard! One single book by Hrabal does more for people, for their freedom of mind, than all the rest of us with our actions, our gestures, our noisy protests!"

Kundera's lingua franca has always been, well, a lingua franca (albeit one of disappearance and return, both somberly and stubbornly poetic in its redefinitions)—Alfred Thomas, author of Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City, captures Kundera's reinvention of Franz Kafka as the prophet of a city of political forgetting in his magisterial tome The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979):

"The point is that Kundera is not analyzing Kafka as an artist but recuperating him as a dissident intellectual, ironically, an extension of the tradition of the committed small-nation writer which Kafka sought to escape by effacing Prague from his work. The next step in this process of reinvention is to turn Kafka back into a Prague writer."

It's not just Kundera and Kafka who Thomas takes on in Prague Palimpsest—the book itself envisions Prague as multilayered text, palimpsestically revised and rewritten, from the perspectives of medieval chroniclers, avant-garde modernists, and dystopian commentators. Thomas engages with the work of its legendary literary figures—Kafka, Kundera, Hrabal, and Rilke among them—but also procures the stories of the authors who wrote the city as outsiders (Celan! Sebald! Apollinaire!), hinting at how Prague, more than any other European city, has haunted the political and cultural imagination of the West.

Kundera's book leaves Simon feeling "challenged and instructed, amused, amazed and aroused, and ultimately delighted." For the rich history of Kundera's literary homeland and the source of his own fluid erasures and remembrances, why not check out Prague Palimpsest and provide yourself another opportunity to encounter the Golden City of memory and forgetting?

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Literature
Posted by KAM at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the days heat up during the summer months in Chicago usually so does the crime, and this year is no exception. And while the entire city suffers the consequences in one way or another, perhaps no one feels it as acutely as Chicago's law enforcement officers. For a closer look at the sometimes harrowing work of Chicago's finest, WBEZ's Eight Forty-Eight invited Chicago Police officer and author Martin Preib on the show yesterday to discuss his job as a cop, and some of the stories he's written about it in his new book The Wagon and Other Stories from the City.

Navigate to the Eight Forty-Eight website to listen to the archived audio from the show or listen to UCP's own podcast with the author and read one of the stories from the book: "Body Bags."

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One hundred years after his passing Mark Twain is about to reinvent himself. Though published in redacted form several times already, Twain's autobiography will finally be released later this year by the University of California Press in an unexpurgated edition that includes all the controversial material left out of earlier editions. Seeming radically different from the personality that penned his classic and beloved depictions of nineteenth-century American life, a recent article in the New York Times notes that in the Autobiography of Mark Twain the author "emerges more pointedly political and willing to play the role of the angry prophet" than ever before. From the NYT:

Twain's opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines, for example, were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.

In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates "the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War" and Gen. Leonard Wood's "mephitic record" as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as "our uniformed assassins" and describes their killing of "six hundred helpless and weaponless savages" as "a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory."

But while such a contrarian self-portrait might seem unprecedented, in fact, in 1973 English and American Studies scholar Hamlin Hill published an iconoclastic biographical account of Mark Twain's later years that anticipated Twain's own latest self-revelations. Despite myths to the contrary perpetrated by Twain's early editors and literary executors, Hill's Mark Twain: God's Fool was one of the first accounts to reveal Twain as a man deeply troubled by a number of personal tragedies, failed business ventures, and harshly critical of the social, economic, and political milieu in which he lived.

Find out more about Twain's autobiography with this recent NYT article or find out more about Hill's groundbreaking biography.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Literature
Posted by TXM at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The June edition of ARTnews magazine contains a piece on artist Josiah McElheny and his obsession with the work of German novelist, poet, and artist, Paul Scheerbart. Through his many writings and drawings Scheerbart envisioned an electrified future, a world composed entirely of crystalline, colored glass—a vision which had a profound influence on many of his contemporaries in the worlds of art and architecture, including Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius.

As the ARTnews article notes, after discovering Scheerbart's work for himself, McElheny's work has been similarly influenced by the ideas of this nineteenth century visionary—not only inspiring McElheny's recent book, The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart's "The Light Club of Batavia", but also a whole series of McElheny's other work, from film, to performances, to sculptures.

To find out more navigate to the article at the ARTnews magazine website .

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new review of Martin Prieb's The Wagon and Other Stories from the City that ran in yesterday's Wall Street Journal begins:

Police thrillers are so widely read and police dramas so commonplace on television that many people think they have a good understanding of what a cop's world is like. But in truth that world is seldom revealed with anything approaching verisimilitude. We get it with "The Wagon."

Commenting on the first story in the collection the review continues:

As with police work itself, the book is only sporadically about gunfights, car chases and collaring criminals. Any television show that depicted the tedium of a police officer's typical day wouldn't draw much of an audience. In truth, most cops go through their entire careers without firing their weapon except on the practice range, but almost all of them are sooner or later called to deal with a dead body. Every cop, no matter how many he has encountered since, remembers his first one.

But few cops are able to describe that rite of passage as convincingly as Mr. Preib does in "Body Bags."

And if won't take the WSJ's word for it you can see for yourself by navigating to the Press website where you can find the full text of "Body Bags" online or listen to a podcast featuring a reading and interview with the author.

Continue reading the WSJ review.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | Literature
Posted by TXM at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Martin Preib is an officer in the Chicago Police Department—a beat cop whose first assignment as a rookie policeman was working on the wagon that picks up the dead. Over the course of countless hours driving the wagon through the city streets, claiming corpses and taking them to the morgue, arresting drunks and criminals and hauling them to jail, Preib took pen to paper to record his experiences. Inspired by Preib’s daily life as a policeman, The Wagon and Other Stories from the City chronicles the outer and inner lives of both a Chicago cop and the city itself.

The book follows Preib as he transports body bags, forges a connection with his female partner, trains a younger officer, and finds himself among people long forgotten—or rendered invisible—by the rest of society. Preib recounts how he navigates the tenuous labyrinths of race and class in the urban metropolis, including a domestic disturbance call involving a gang member and his abused girlfriend and a run-in with a group of drunk yuppies. Preib’s accounts, all told in his breathtaking prose, range from noir-like reports of police work to streetwise meditations on life and darkly humorous accounts of other jobs in the city’s service industry. Here, Preib’s universe of police officers, criminals, and victims—and everyone in between—comes alive in ways that readers will long remember.

Read the press release.

Also, read a story: "Body Bags" and listen to a podcast.

Archived in Chicago | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Saturday's edition of the Chicago Tribune ran a review of Martin Preib's The Wagon and Other Stories from the City. With most of its content gleaned from a recent interview with Preib, the review offers some interesting background on the experiences that have inspired his writing, including his work with the Chicago Police Department and in various other capacities within Chicago's service industry.

You can read it read it online at the Printers Row blog (Preib is also scheduled to appear at the Printers Row Lit Fest June 12 and 13).

Also, read a story from the book: "Body Bags" and listen to Preib discussing his work on the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the latest episode of our podcast, Chicago Audio Works, Chicago Police officer, author, one-time doorman, union organizer, and bouncer Martin Prieb reads from his new book The Wagon and Other Stories from the City and answers a few questions about his work and writing.

Inspired by Preib's daily life as a policeman—as well as his many other experiences working in the Windy City's service sector—The Wagon offers a view of city life from the vantage point of one of it's newest most trenchant, and authentic chroniclers. With material that ranges from noir-like reports of police work to streetwise meditations on life and darkly humorous accounts of his other occupations, The Wagon brings the city of Chicago to life in ways that readers will long remember.

For more read this review in this week's issue of the Chicago Reader (scroll down to the bottom of the page), or read a story from the book: "Body Bags."

Hear more readings, interviews, and other features from our authors on Chicago Audio Works.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Chicago | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Combining the incisive pen of a newspaperman and the compassionate soul of a poet, Mike Royko became a Chicago institution—in Jimmy Breslin’s words, “the best journalist of his time.” Early Royko: Up Against It in Chicago will restore to print the legendary columnist’s earliest writings, which chronicle 1960s Chicago with the moral vision, ironic sense, and razor-sharp voice that would remain Royko’s trademark.

This collection of early columns from the Chicago Daily News ranges from witty social commentary to politically astute satire. Some of the pieces are falling-down funny and others are tenderly nostalgic, but all display Royko’s unrivaled skill at using humor to tell truth to power. From machine politicians and gangsters to professional athletes, from well-heeled Chicagoans to down-and-out hoodlums, no one escapes Royko’s penetrating gaze—and resounding judgment. Early Royko features a memorable collection of characters, including such well-known figures as Hugh Hefner, Mayor Richard J. Daley, and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Accompanied by a foreword from Rick Kogan, this new edition will delight Royko’s most ardent fans and capture the hearts of a new generation of readers. As Kogan writes, Early Royko “will remind us how a remarkable relationship began—Chicago and Royko, Royko and Chicago—and how it endures.”

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Seth Lerer, author of Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter has won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Lerer's book—a comprehensive survey of children's literature, from Aesop's Fables to Harry Potter—offers a fascinating exploration of the various ways that tales like these have helped shape the Western literary imagination. According to the award press release:

"The book is also a kind of 'intellectual autobiography," touching on Lerer's own youthful passion for reading and his experience as a parent. "I thought about it from a personal view, watching how my son grew into a reader," he said.

Maria Tatar of Harvard University called the book "a breathtakingly powerful and complex history of children's literature that energizes rather than depletes."

"Lerer gives us the facts" Tatar said, "but he also weaves experiences and stories into an account that moves in registers ranging from the ecstatic to the elegiac. An ideal guide for students new to the field of children's literature as well as for scholars familiar with the territory."

For more details read the press release.

For more about the book read this excerpt.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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Most of the books in The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe—a series from the Press that explores the role of women in early modern European culture—don't usually receive a whole lot of attention from non-academic reviewers. So it seems reasonable to take a minute to note when they do.

Benjamin Ivry has recently written a blog post about Don Harrán's translation of the poetry and prose of Sarra Copia Sulam in Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice for the Forward magazine blog, The Arty Semite. In his post, Ivry frames the 17th C. Italian-Jewish luminary as the "Susan Sontag of the Venetian Ghetto," and cites her unique ability to overcome the dual obstacles of her gender, and her religion, to produce the body of work that established her as the first Italian-Jewish public literary figure in Europe.

Check it out online at The Arty Semite blog then take a look at some of the other titles in our OVIEME series featuring the fascinating poetry and prose of some of the best, though, less well known female voices of the early modern period.

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Reviews
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Bruce Smith, author of several books of poems including Songs for Two Voices, The Other Lover, and Mercy Seat, was recently awarded a 2010 Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award, which not only offers its recipients formal recognition by one of the foremost arts institutions in the country, but a cash prize as well, will be presented in New York in May at the Academy's annual Ceremonial.

Read the press release at the Academy of Arts and Letters website.

More about Smith's poetry from his bio at The Poetry Foundation website:

Influenced by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Smith's poetry moves like jazz, incorporating images and narratives into a startling, musically unified whole. In a 2007 interview, Smith explained his poetry's aspiration to song: "When the language works to seduce and … move us, when it works its blues on us, bounces us and trembles us, makes us swerve from our upright and rational propositions … we are thinking and listening at the same time or really listening and not thinking, like a good song does."

Follow the links for more on Smith's works from the University of Chicago Press:

Songs for Two Voices
The Other Lover
Mercy Seat

Archived in Awards | Literature
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Lapham's Quarterly reprints two rejection letters, illustrating the perils of publishers everywhere.

Back in 1912, the London publisher Arthur Fifield channeled the author to reject the manuscript for Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. Droll. "Hardly one copy would sell here." Nearly a century later, the book remains in print. And in another month or two, we will bring back into print lectures that Stein delivered at the University of Chicago in 1935 as Narration.

And, one of the best-crafted (and probably best known) rejection letters in literary history, Norman Maclean rejects an entreaty by an editor at Alfred A. Knopf. We can't help but re-read that one every time. There but for the grace of Allen Fitchen . . .

Archived in Commentary | Literature
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Adrian Johns, author of Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates has written a posting for the Washington Post's Short Stack blog. In his post, Johns discusses the blowback that can result from attempts to clamp down on illegal copying:

Over the last half-millennium, measures to defend creative property have repeatedly proved counterproductive—not just because individual pirates themselves escaped, but because those measures triggered public reactions against their own proponents. The major transitions that constitute the history of intellectual property itself were repeatedly caused by precisely this kind of reaction. In effect, the present nature of both copyrights and patents is a legacy of this long history of police overreach.

For more navigate to the Washington Post's Short Stack blog. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Law | Literature | Politics and Current Events
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In a recent book review in last Saturday's Weekend Australian Roy Williams begins by acknowledging intellectual property disputes as one of he most pressing issue of the twenty-fist century. As Williams writes:

The laws of copyright, patents and related regimes are notoriously arcane; they are a mystery to most lawyers, let alone the public. Yet intellectual property is integral to some of the curliest issues of the early 21st century: the regulation of biotechnology, the digitisation of news and books, and freer access for the Third World to life-saving drugs, to name just three. To understand contemporary geopolitics, a working knowledge of intellectual property is mandatory.

Enter Adrian Johns's, Piracy: Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, offering readers the definitive historical account of every important IP dispute from the advent of print culture all the way to the present day, augmented by the unparalleled insights of its author.

Noting one particularly fascinating example Williams writes:

Especially compelling is the detailed account of the emergence of the modern notion of copyright. [Johns] analyses the central role played by London book traders of the 17th and 18th centuries. Based around Stationers Hall near St Paul's Cathedral, they made their living selling cheap reprints of books by local and foreign authors, and infuriated many influential people.

As Johns explains, foreigners were helpless to prevent their titles being exploited. Important local (English) authors and publishers were protected to some extent by a rudimentary royal licence system, but even that fell into abeyance during the internecine British wars of 1642-60 and in the generation following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. By the 1690s, it was open slather.…

Arguments and counter-arguments raged about the relative importance of untrammelled commerce, the open discussion of ideas and information in the public sphere, and due respect for the creative process.

Eventually, in 1710, the British parliament imposed a compromise by enacting the world's first copyright law. The principles were debated and refined in subsequent decades. The basic notion—now taken for granted—is that authors should be encouraged to create. They have no inherent proprietary rights in their work, but are granted a limited monopoly by government fiat. Crucially, the monopoly extends only to the mode of expression of their ideas, not the ideas themselves.

For more, continue reading on the Weekend Australian website, or read this excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews
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Adrian Johns, author of Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates was recently interviewed by Serena Golden of Inside Higher Ed. In a series of questions that highlight several of the current hot-button issues in the IP debate including biotechnology patents and the Google books settlement, Golden engages Johns in a fascinating conversation that expands upon the historical account of intellectual property disputes found in Johns's book. A sample from the interview follows, or navigate to the Inside Higher Ed website for the complete article.

Q: Which of the current intellectual property debates do you see as most consequential, and why?

A: I see two conflicts as especially consequential: the patent struggles in the life sciences, and the copyright furor ignited by the Google Books initiative. In the life sciences, patenting has become a huge issue in several contexts. The pharmaceuticals industry has aroused fierce controversy in the developing world because of what are perceived as inequitable restrictions, agribusiness has generated similarly intense arguments, and biotechnology involves extending IP into the domain of life and its constituents. The stakes for the future of IP here are high because the human consequences are so evident, and the political interests very real. In the case of Google Books, the extraordinary promise of this vast enterprise may only be realizable via severe qualifications to the principles and practices by which publishing has operated for generations. The compromises that lie at the heart of copyright are in play once more. They may not seem so reasonable when the possibility exists of such a huge expansion of access to the world's books. Yet on the other hand, such access would give Google itself substantial control.

In these realms, challenges are looming to the two basic elements of our intellectual property system. I do not think it inconceivable that they could provoke legal and (perhaps) policy shifts as major as the establishment of copyright itself in the eighteenth century, and the development of modern patent systems in the nineteenth.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Law | Literature
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Offering some fascinating insights on one of the most contentious issues in publishing right now, a review of Adrian John's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates appeared in the January 21 edition of Abu Dhabi's The National. Reviewer Caleb Crain writes "by making words, music and images easy to copy and share, the internet may seem to have fractured trust between producers and consumers of culture around the world in a novel way. But in fact, producers and consumers have been in conflict for centuries." In his new book Johns offers a detailed account of this conflict, from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century, to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first.

In his review Crain briefly summarizes the history of intellectual property disputes detailed in Johns's book, and picks out a few details he finds most salient to current debates. From The National:

When literary property was abolished in Paris after 1789, cheaply printed, timely, derivative literature flushed everything else out of the marketplace—imagine the final triumph of the Huffington Post over the New York Times. Moralistic bullying failed when 19th-century American reprinters tried to agree not to pirate one another's piracies. Turning on consumers led to public relations disaster when the BBC hunted down illicit listeners in the 1920s, and again when Hollywood fought video tapes as home piracy in the 1980s. Unlike bullying and persecution, however, law has sometimes succeeded, especially when law has built on the conventions and courtesies that authors, publishers and readers have aspired to live up to among themselves. Yet some laws have proved so ambiguous that litigants have lost heart, gone bankrupt, or died before they could recover their rights.

In other words, Google's private negotiations with publishers and authors are an excellent start, but to ensure the future of copyright online, the people of the world, through their elected representatives, need to have a look for themselves. Intellectual property has been reconsidered and renegotiated with every new technology, and to hesitate to do so now, out of a timorous respect for earlier compromises, would be a failure of imagination.

Read the full review on The National website. The review's author Caleb Crain also posts opinion and criticism to his blog, Steamboats are Ruining Everything.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews
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For the next 24 hours only the University of Chicago Press is pleased to offer the e-edition of Adrian John's brand new book Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates as a free download from our website.

About the book&mdash: "[Johns] traces the tensions between authorized and unauthorized producers and distributors of books, music, and other intellectual property in British and American culture from the 17th century to the present. … The shifting theoretical arguments about copyright and authorial property are presented in a cogent and accessible manner. Johns' research stands as an important reminder that today's intellectual property crises are not unprecedented, and offers a survey of potential approaches to a solution." —Publishers Weekly

Check back tomorrow for Johns' previous work, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, (click the link for more about the book), and at the beginning of every month for more free e-books from the University of Chicago Press. Or to browse all our currently available e-books, see our complete list of e-books by subject.

E-books from the University of Chicago Press are offered in Adobe Digital Editions format for Mac, PC, and a number of mobile devices such as the Sony Reader, IREX, BeBook, and more. Check out these links to find out more about Adobe Digital Editions or more about e-books from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Press Releases
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"Hecht was a reporter, a newspaper man in America's hottest crime city during American journalism's golden age." So begins Richard Rayner's review of the University of Chicago Press's republication of Ben Hecht's writing for the Chicago Daily News in A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago.

Though he is perhaps best known for his work in Hollywood as a screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist, Ben Hecht began his career on the gritty streets of Chicago, chronicling the city as a reporter with a knack for penetrating through the city's layers of dust and ice to capture a rarely seen vision of the life it contained, as Rayner writes:

"I have lived in other cities but been inside only one," Hecht said, and 1,001 Afternoons in Chicago, originally published in 1922 and recently re-issued in a gorgeous paperback facsimile of the first edition, records that intimacy.

"I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock," Hecht notes. He haunted "streets, studios, whore houses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, mad houses, fires, murders, banquets, and bookshops." He earned his early glamour as a brash poet of Chicago's underbelly.

And indeed from the story of a judge "trying to winkle out the story of a young prostitute on the stand," to the dark ruminations of an escaped convict, to the captains of industry, to immigrant day laborers, in 1,001 Afternoons in Chicago Hecht captures 1920s Chicago in all its furor, intensity, and absurdity.

Read Rayner's full review on the LA Times website.

Archived in Chicago | Literature | Reviews
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Good news from the world of publishing isn't easy to come by, so a new outlet for Midwestern writers of literary fiction is a welcome development. Thus we tip our collective hats to our good friends at Northern Illinois University Press and their new imprint Switchgrass Books, which debuts with Season of Water and Ice by Michigan writer Donald Lystra and Beautiful Piece by Joseph G. Peterson, who we are pleased to count a colleague here at the Press.

Set somewhere in Chicago during the 1995 Chicago heat wave, Peterson's noirish novel is the gritty, hallucinatory story of a risky relationship and its inevitable, chilling climax. Meanwhile, Lystra's book tracks the life of young Danny DeWitt and his father as they struggle with issues of love and family in rural northern Michigan in the 1950's. Set side by side Switchgrass's inaugural releases represent the rich diversity of the Midwestern literary landscape and the hidden talent lurking there.

To find out more about Switchgrass books navigate to their website or listen to this recent interview with NIU press director Alex Schwartz talking about the new imprint and it's first two releases on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight.

Our warm congratulations.

Archived in Chicago | Commentary | Fiction | Literature
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"Yes, we are all lost and wandering in the thick mists. We have no destinations. The city is without outlines. And the drift of figures is a meaningless thing. Figures that are going nowhere and coming from nowhere. A swarm of supernumeraries who are not in the play. Who saunter, dash, scurry, hesitate in search of a part in the play."

Ben Hecht (1894—1964) was a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Daily Journal and the Chicago Daily News as well as a playwright, novelist, short story writer, and scriptwriter.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Literature
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In January we announced the birth of the new series "South Asia Across the Disciplines"—a unique collaborative publication effort between Columbia University Press, the University of California Press, and the University of Chicago Press designed to increase publication opportunities for emerging scholars in the field. We recently unveiled a new website for the project offering more details, including a formal call for submissions and a list of forthcoming publications at www.saacrossdisciplines.org.

According to the SAAD website:

"South Asia Across the Disciplines" publishes work that aims to raise innovative questions in the field. These include the relationship between South Asian studies and the disciplines; the conversation between past and present in South Asia; the history and nature of modernity, especially in relation to cultural change, political transformation, secularism and religion, and globalization. Above all, the series showcases monographs that strive to open up new archives, especially in South Asian languages, and suggest new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal. We invite manuscripts from art history, history, literary studies, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences, especially those that show an openness to disciplines other than their own.

As a collaboration among leading university presses, "South Asia Across the Disciplines" marks a new approach. Each book in the series is published under the imprint of one of the three presses, but all are promoted as part of the series, sharing in design, advertising, and publicity.

To find out more about this exciting new publication initiative from three of the academy's leading publishers, navigate to www.saacrossdisciplines.org.

Archived in Anthropology | History | Literature | Religion | UCP News
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First appearing in somewhat different form as a series of dispatches on McSweeney's Internet Tendency—an excellent literary site to add to your list of bookmarks—Philip Graham's new book The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon offers readers an exuberant yet introspective account of the author's year long sojourn in Lisbon with his family as they explore Portugal's music, its inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture.

Recently, Graham was interviewed about his book on the Inside Higher Ed. blog, The Education of Oronte Chrum. Here's an interesting passage from the interview wherein Graham answers a question put to him about "writing other cultures" and the "dangers of misrepresentation":

I think the dangers of misrepresentation when describing a conversation you had five minutes ago with a family member or friend are high, too. Because the thoughts of others are unavailable to us, humans have to make do with varying skills of interpretation. We're all fiction writers of a sort, throughout our lives shaping characters out of the selected and often misleading signals we receive from the people we think we know. A spotty business at best, this. But what's the alternative except deepening isolation?

The same goes for travel, since every country on the globe shares a second, secret name of Pitfall. Yet sometimes where you live doesn't give you what you need or want or whatever you're secretly searching for, and when you find a place that does, that becomes the most rewarding travel, the kind where each footstep on the outside is accompanied by an echoing footstep within. These steps are necessarily tentative. In The Moon, Come to Earth, I tried to separate from myself any notion of being an expert. I was and remain simply your run-of-the-mill flawed fellow, awkwardly nosing about another culture, never quite sure what I might come upon, what might resonate inside me, attract or appall me.

Continue reading the full interview on The Education of Oronte Churm blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Literature
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If you saw just one episode of the PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea, or if you saw them all, you saw certain images repeatedly: brown bears catching salmon at Brooks Falls, a wolf loping across a meadow in Denali, bison lumbering through the snow of Hayden Valley, and Mt. McKinley rising to improbable heights above a cloud bank. These signature images are like a visual glue that Ken Burns used to hold together the multitude of places and people covered in the National Parks series.

These indelible character of these signature images, and all the magnificent images in the series, attest to the remarkable power that photographic images of natural scenery have to create a compelling story and and establish cognitive and emotional connections with the parks as well as with the people who have preserved them. The National Parks series becomes the latest in a long chain of photographic imagery, including the work of Ansel Adams and New Deal filmmakers, to picture nature as a place of grace for the individual and the nation.

This is the subject of a book we published a few years ago, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform by Finis Dunaway. He tells the story of how visual imagery shaped modern perceptions of the natural world. By examining the relationship between the camera and environmental politics through detailed studies of key artists and activists, Dunaway captures the emotional and spiritual meaning that became associated with the American landscape.

We have an excerpt from the book which discusses the role of coffee-table picture books, especially those published by the Sierra Club under the leadership of David Brower, in creating an environmental consciousness that protected natural areas across the country. One book, This is Dinosaur, played a significant role in the battle over damming the Green River in the area known as Echo Park, in Dinosaur National Monument—a story told in Episode Six of the series. This is Dinosaur, edited by Wallace Stegner, who first called the national parks "the best idea we ever had," was part of the successful campaign to galvanize public and Congressional opinion and defeat the Green River dam project.

Archived in Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
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Bright Star, the new film written and directed by Jane Campion, opened in the Chicago area yesterday. Bright Star weaves a story of the romantic love and poetic longing of John Keats and Fanny Brawne during the last three years of Keats' too-short life. Campion's script was, according to today's review in the Chicago Tribune, "inspired by the exceptional Andrew Motion biography Keats," which we published in paperback in 1999.

Motion's biography is an interesting choice for a filmmaker. Andrew Motion is a poet above all; he served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. He has numerous books of poetry to his credit, as well as criticism and several other biographies. Keats is a poet's biography of a poet; it is steeped in the words of the poet, shaped primarily by Keats' letters and punctuated by Keats' poems. It is as textual as you can get.

Keats has come down to us, Motion writes, as a poets' poet: the champion of truth and beauty, a sensualist, the archetype of the Romantic poet, who poured out words in a frenetic rush, writing all the poems we know him for in the space of a month or two. But Motion gives us another side of John Keats. Unlike previous biographers, he pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited—a young man, trying to climb up from his working class origins, shaped by radical political ideas as well as by notions of truth, beauty, and romantic love.

We have an excerpt from the book which discusses Keats, Fanny Brawne, and Keats' poem to her, "Bright Star."

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Literature | Poetry
Posted by DB at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lawrence Rothfield's The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum offers a revealing look at the plundering of Iraq's cultural heritage during the Iraq war. Housing relics dating back to the dawn of human civilization some twelve thousand years ago, Iraq's National Museum as well as many important archeological sites were looted while, according to Rothfield, nearly everyone, including some of the highest ranking U.S. government officials, simply looked the other way. As Benjamin Moser writes his review for the September edition of Harper's magazine:

The destruction inevitable in wartime might have been mitigated if Iraq had not suffered the bad luck of being invaded by George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. One of the many low points of their low endeavor came when Rumsfeld (whose boundless self-regard was untethered to any reckonable aptitude) said that "stuff happens" in reply to early reports of widespread looting. "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over," Rumsfeld scoffed, "and its the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you think 'M y goodness, were there that many vases?'"

This attitude, Rothfield shows, … even placed Rummy and his "war president" in unfavorable contrast with Saddam Hussein, who, during his invasion of Kuwait, took precautions to prevent the looting of the Kuwait Museum.… After Rumsfeld ignored repeated pleas to prevent the entirely foreseeable looting, disaster came: a full-scale destruction of countless monuments in the birthplace of civilization.

A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.

Pick up a copy of Harper's magazine to read the full review and in the meantime, read this excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're used to seeing, usually in the New York Review of Books, J. M. Coetzee's frequent book reviews. And we have first-hand experience (pdf) of what a great job the Notices of the American Mathematical Society does with its book reviews section.

Still, it was a surprise to learn from the complete review that these two reliable patterns of the book reviewing world had combined in such an unexpected way. But perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising at all, because the book Coetzee reviews in the new issue of Notices (pdf) is all about a similar sort of well suited yet not wholly expected pair. About Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, Coetzee opines that "there are a priori grounds for thinking of poetry and mathematics together, as two rarefied forms of symbolic activity based on the power of the human mind to detect hidden analogies. In other words, an anthology like Strange Attractors, which brings together a hundred and fifty poems with some degree of mathematical content, makes more a priori sense than, say, a collection of famous speeches with some mathematical content."

Well worth reading for reasons beyond its novelty, the review (along with the small matter of that Nobel-winning oeuvre) reminds us for the nth time what a coup it is to have published books both by and about such a brilliant writer.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Poetry
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Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso both spoke today at the city's annual August 6 ceremony, held to mark the anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack, which on this day in 1945 decimated Hiroshima and killed or fatally harmed 140,000 people. In today's Daily Telegraph, columnist Kate Day compares the event to past August Sixths with a series of striking photographs that reflect the way the city has incorporated its tragic past into its modern landscape.

John Whittier Treat's Writing Ground Zero delves deep into that process, recounting controversial history of Japanese public discourse around Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a discourse alternatively celebrated and censored—from August 6, 1945, to the present day.

The first complete study of the nuclear theme in Japan's intellectual and artistic life, Writing Ground Zero covers works from the earliest survivor writers, including Hara Tamiki and Ota Yoko, as well as such intellectuals as Oe Kenzaburo and Oda Makoto. Outlining the Japanese contribution to ongoing international debates on ethics and history, it adds a rich context to Prime Minister Taro Aso's hope that, as he put it today, "Japan will … lead the international community toward the abolishment of nuclear weapons and lasting peace."

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | History | Literature
Posted by at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sixty years ago today, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned.

One of those three survivors, Bob Sallee, will speak to the public this week in Montana as part of ceremonies held to observe the anniversary of the conflagration.

Sallee, of course, also figures prominently in Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, which hauntingly searches out and fits together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

In this evocative excerpt, Maclean reflects on how it was that of the crew only Rumsey and Sallee survived.

If you had known ahead of time that only two would survive, you probably never would have picked these two—they were first-year jumpers, this was the first fire they had ever jumped on, Sallee was one year younger than the minimum age, and around the base they were known as roommates who had a pretty good time for themselves. They both became big operators in the world of the woods and prairies, and part of this story will be to find them and ask them why they think they alone survived, but even if ultimately your answer or theirs seems incomplete, this seems a good place to start asking the question. In their statements soon after the fire, both say that the moment Dodge reversed the route of the crew they became alarmed, for, even if they couldn't see the fire, Dodge's order was to run from one. They reacted in seconds or less. They had been traveling at the end of the line because they were carrying unsheathed saws. When the head of the line started its switchback, Rumsey and Sallee left their positions at the end of the line, put on extra speed, and headed straight uphill, connecting with the front of the line to drop into it right behind Dodge.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | History | Literature
Posted by at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sixty years ago this August, a crew of fifteen of the Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned.

Bob Sallee, then just seventeen, was one of the survivors. In a new radio interview for American Public Media's The Story Sallee relates the harrowing tale of how he survived the blaze that raced up Mann Gulch. For years Sallee declined to talk about that day, until Norman Maclean—best known for authoring the classic story, A River Runs Through It—contacted Sallee in the course of research for Young Men and Fire.

Maclean, an English professor at the University of Chicago and a former wilderness firefighter, spent the final years of his life researching the story which, for him exemplified a moment when "life takes on the shape of art," whose "remembered remnants… are largely what we come to mean by life and become almost all of what we remember of ourselves."

Listen to the archived audio from Sallee's interview and see our website for Maclean, including an excerpt of the decisive moment of Young Men and Fire.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the imminent Fourth of July holiday ushers in the annual paeans to American independence and editorials about the importance of remembering its history, several momentous chapters in our national story—including the temporary misplacement of America, the unfreezing of the Earth, and the invention of the prairie dog—are once again missing from the familiar Independence Day narrative.

So it's a good thing that, just in time to correct these grievous oversights, we rediscovered in the vault Walter Blair's Tall Tale America, a classic of American humor that features as its chief historical figures not presidents, military leaders, and tycoons but folk heroes and popular characters such as Davy Crockett (and his pipe-smoking pet bear Death Hug), Old Stormalong, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry.

More traditional characters do make brief appearances: Blair briefly tells the story, for example, of when Thomas Jefferson "put on one of his oldest suits of clothes, just to show he was one of the folks.… walked from his boarding house through the mud up the hill to the brand new Senate chamber, and started to run the country." But the tall tales of "Daniel Boone's Discovery of Kentucky and His Other Puzzling Habits" and "Seaman Tom Smith's Theory about Dry Oceans"—not to mention their accompanying illustrations by John Sandford—are, if we may say so, much more interesting.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
Posted by at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began an unprecedented project to reconstruct the palace of Knossos on Crete, but instead, as Cathy Gere demonstrates in her new book, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, created a complex of concrete buildings on the site owing at least as much to modernist architecture as to Bronze Age remains. As Tom Holland of the Times Literary Supplement writes: "the fabulously ancient palace of Knossos enjoys, as Gere points out in her arresting first sentence, 'the dubious distinction of being one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on the island.'"

Gere shows how Evans' idiosyncratic reconstruction of the palace of Knossos was nevertheless successful at bringing ancient Greek legends to life and sparking the imaginations of a host of twentieth century artists and intellectuals. Influencing the likes of Joyce, Picasso, and Sigmund Freud to name a few, Evans' often fanciful vision of Cretan civilization, promulgated through the work of visionaries like these, had a profoundly transformative effect on the way Western culture viewed its past, as well as its future.

On Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 7:00 PM Gere is scheduled to make an appearance at Washington DC's Corcoran Gallery of Art to deliver a talk on the subject, examining how—based on Evans' work—European modernism reimagined ancient Cretean civilization in its own image, employing its creative reinterpretation of Cretan society as an early blueprint for twentieth century movements as disparate as fascism, pacifism, feminism and psychoanalysis.

For more about the book see Tom Holland's recent review for the TLS and another review from the May 14 edition of the Economist. For more details on Gere's lecture, navigate to Corcoran Gallery website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Events | History | Literature
Posted by TXM at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let’s get this straight from the start: Bigfoot doesn’t exist. All the reported sightings are almost certainly either mistakes or hoaxes. At the same time, Bigfoot is America’s premier homegrown monster, a figure as familiar as—if far hairier than—Uncle Sam. And he remains big news: when two men from rural Georgia claimed last autumn that they’d killed a Bigfoot, reporters and camera crews flocked to their press conference, and more than 1,000 news stories followed worldwide.

Just what makes this shaggy beast so enduring? With Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, Joshua Blu Buhs hacks his way through the forest of myths, mysteries, and pseudoscience surrounding Bigfoot to write a cultural history of this modern monster. Buhs begins his trek in the forests of nineteenth-century America, with tales of wildmen roaming the hills; he then travels to the Himalayas to come to grips (not literally) with the Abominable Snowman, then back to the late 1950s in northern California, where the contemporary creature first emerged as a media marvel. Along the way, we meet hunters and hucksters, charlatans and serious seekers, as Buhs travels the back roads of America in an attempt to understand Bigfoot’’s hold on our imagination. Just what does all the ensuing cryptozoology and craziness say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, and the media?

Though Buhs always keeps his skeptic’s eye open, he writes with an enthusiast’s deep love for his subject; the result is a biography of Bigfoot that will leave other hunters following its footprints for years to come.

Read the press release.

Also, see an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now Available in Paperback— This Wide and Universal Theater explores how Shakespeare’s plays were produced both in his own time and in succeeding centuries. David Bevington brings Shakespeare’s original stagings to life, explaining how the Elizabethan playhouse conveyed a sense of place using minimal scenery, from the Forest of Arden in As You Like It to the tavern in Henry IV, Part I. Moving beyond Shakespeare’s lifetime, Bevington shows the lengths to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century companies went to produce spectacular effects. To bring the book into the present, Bevington considers recent productions on both stage and screen, when character and language have taken precedence over spectacle. This volume brings a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare’s art.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The last issue of the Chicago Reader contains a special section on new Spring books with a couple of interesting articles profiling Asian American writers and their new works, including the latest from novelist and poet Ha Jin. The Writer as Migrant is a collection of three interconnected essays that draw both on his own experiences as a Chinese immigrant living in the U.S., as well as the writing of other famous literary exiles, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, and Joseph Conrad, to illustrate the unique obstacles and opportunities that face those writing in a foreign language, and in a foreign land. The Reader article focuses on Jin's personal struggles between feelings of alienation from his native Chinese language and culture, and the greater intellectual freedoms he has experienced writing in the U.S.:

When he started writing, Jin says, "I viewed myself as a Chinese writer who would write in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese." But how could he write on behalf of a people if he couldn't also address them? Since his books often deal with the politics of modern China—his first volume of poems, Between Silences: A Voice From China, is based on his experiences in the Chinese army—most of them haven't been published there. One exception is Waiting, his best-known and least political novel—and even that's been condemned by some as anti-China.

Of course, had he returned to China he could have written in Chinese. Then again, he might not be writing at all. Jin thinks he'd have become a translator or critic or maybe a professor, but wouldn't have written much. When he was starting out in the U.S., he says, writing was a matter of survival: he was on the tenure track at Emory and had to publish to keep his job. But writing in English offers another sort of survival as well. It's "a way for me to do meaningful work in a language that's not controlled by authorities. In that way it's a matter of artistic survival."

So he writes in English, even though he argues in the book's second essay, "The Language of Betrayal," that "no matter how the writer attempts to rationalize and justify adopting a foreign language, it is an act of betrayal that alienates him from his mother tongue.…"

Read the rest of the article online at the Chicago Reader website.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
Posted by TXM at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Whereas, on his 445th birthday this April 23, Shakespeare still speaks to the people of Chicago through timeless words and works," Mayor Daley proclaimed Thursday "to be Talk Like Shakespeare Day in Chicago"—much to the manifest delight of pun-loving reporters and headline writers across the country.

But while the linguistic dexterity that gives us Da Bard is praiseworthy, it's even more impressive to be able to pronounce Shakespeare's lexicon correctly. That's where Shakespearean voice and text coach Gary Logan comes in.

In a book that was destined to have been published by a press whose hometown would eventually beget Talk Like Shakespeare Day, Logan aims to untie tongues and help anyone speak Shakespeare's language with ease. The Eloquent Shakespeare includes more than 17,500 entries, making it the most comprehensive pronunciation guide to Shakespeare's words—and the best possible preparation for this Thursday in Chicago.

Archived in Literature | Reference and Writing
Posted by at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In one of the many articles that have appeared recently about higher education during the recession—covering everything from increased applications to the reshuffled popularity of different fields—Slate asks whether advanced education really pays off during times like these. Laurel, one of the many students whose experiences the article cites in formulating an answer, has a familiar story:

"Many of the academic jobs that I applied to were cancelled," Laurel writes. "I've been scouring Craigslist but thus far I haven't found a position that requests familiarity with obscure art historical literature from the 18th century written in Serbo-Croatian.… I am hurdling toward being the saddest type of graduate student—the one who has finished and is at a loss for what to do next. I'm going to be the one sitting on the front steps of that Ivory Tower with my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands just begging to be let back in."

But Laurel has other options, as Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius point out in "So What Are You Going to Do with That?"—which explains why the paths leading away from the Ivory Tower can be just as rewarding for the tens of thousands of Ph.D.'s and M.A.'s who leave grad school every year. Designed for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world—whether by choice or necessity—"So What Are You Going to Do with That?" covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to translating skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate.

And that's a skill whose value any new graduate can appreciate.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the past eight years the term "intellectual" has been frequently interpreted by the media as a piece of anti-populist or elitist rhetoric. But in a recent article for the New Republic Ross Posnock notes that Obama's presidency has rehabilitated the term as one of praise rather than opprobrium, and with it interest in the history of black intellectualism in America. Tapping into this renewed interest, Posnock cites Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's new book, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher for its revealing look at the life and thought of its highly influential, yet often neglected subject.

Inheriting the role of the leading spokesperson for black intellectualism from such figures as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Boise, the authors show how Alain L. Locke both continued their legacy of leadership but also vitally updated the role. Posnock writes: Harris and Molesworth's book "brings alive [Locke's] distinctive fashioning of the role of black intellectual" demonstrating his unique ability to operate as "a race man," but also as "an apolitical aesthete," keeping "up the pressure on both roles, as his thought continually refined itself and deepened." Thus, expanding the influence of black intellectuals in American culture Harris and Molesworth deliver fascinating evidence of Locke's profound impact as the "father of the Harlem Renaissance," promoting and sparring with such diverse figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey among others.

To find out more about Locke's unique and important contributions to American culture read Posnock's article at the New Republic website, then pick up a copy of Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writer Philip Connors reviews The Norman Maclean Reader in the March 30 issue of The Nation. Connors, who acknowledges that his life has certain similarities with Maclean's, recounts Maclean's life and literary works: the one book published in his lifetime (A River Runs Through It and Other Stories) and another published posthumously (Young Men and Fire).

"His career," writes Connors, "is one of the strangest in American letters." He relates some of the memorable moments of Maclean's publishing history, including the letter he wrote to a publisher who was trying to court the writer after the publication of A River Runs Through It. Connors continues:

It's not as if Maclean didn't know his stories were strange. He often said he wrote them in part so the world would know of what artistry men and women were capable in the woods of his youth, before helicopters and chain saws rendered obsolete the ancient skills of packing with mules and felling trees with crosscut saws. Artistry, specifically artistry with one's hands, was for him among life's most refined achievements.

Read the whole review; there are some interesting reflections on the religious resonances of Maclean's works.

We have a website for Norman Maclean.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have a winner. The National Book Critics Circle announced the winners of their 2008 awards today and we are happy to congratulate Seth Lerer on his win in the criticism category for Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter.

A few days ago NBCC board member Carlin Romano described, in a posting to Critical Mass, the achievements of the book and the fairy-tale-like spell it cast on the committee:

Lerer brought to his subject both the critical acuity and unlimited openness it deserved. He insisted on placing a complex literature within the history of childhood, a story both contested and blessedly clear. He took into account the cavalcade of publishing history, without permitting it to trample the imaginative "transformations" wrought by the books. He understood that his terrain included not just books written for children, but books read by them, driving home the critical spine signaled by his subtitle.

Lerer accomplished much else in his fairy-tale feat of levitating a University of Chicago Press study, despite its small type, to a possible national prize from critics beleaguered by eye strain.… Members of the NBCC Board swallowed whole this splendid meditation on the literature that changes us most, and lived happily ever after.

Our warmest congratulations to Seth Lerer.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Awards | Literature
Posted by DB at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Offering a tale of passion, vivacity, and beauty appropriate for some Valentines weekend reading, Shirley Hazzard's new book The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples eloquently recounts the author's love affair with a city, which, ironically, has recently gained more notoriety for the proliferation of both its crime, and its trash. But as reviewer Judith Martin notes in her article for this Sunday's NYT Book Review, while acknowledging the city's more contemporary conundrums, Hazzard's insight into Naples' rich history and culture is more than enough to redeem its romantic soul. From Martin's review:

Shirley Hazzard, the noted Australian writer, lives in New York but has spent long stretches of time in a house on Capri. She counts herself as one of the few living Anglo-Americans with a lifelong crush on Naples, rather than the usual Italian cities: Florence, Rome or (as in my case) Venice. In Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, she writes poetically about the lure of an intimate daily relationship with the architectural remains of Naples many rich historical epochs.…

She loves visiting other centuries, a lure that every history-hungry traveler will recognize, and beautifully describes the wonders strewn everywhere about the region. Her sense of the presence of past visitors like Augustus Caesar, Goethe, and Lord Byron should resonate with any lover of Italy.

See this Sunday's New York Times to read the complete review, also read the introduction to the book, "Italian Hours."

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times reports today that intellectual historian and author John Patrick Diggins passed away Wednesday in Manhattan at the age of 73. Diggins—whose scholarly work encompassed the breadth of American political thought from "the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the present day"—was known for his "provocative, revisionist approach to the history of the American left and right." The NYT notes that "he nourished a sneaking fondness for the Lyrical Left but declared Ronald Reagan to be 'one of the two or three truly great presidents in history.'" The NYT article continues: "The tension between liberal ideals, pragmatism and authority ran like a leitmotif through books like The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest and the Foundation of Liberalism, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority and Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy"—all of which the University of Chicago Press is honored to have published.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | History | Literature | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some news of note from all around the world wide web:

Over at ReadySteadyBook, Sharon Cameron's Impersonality: Seven Essays has been selected as a book of the month for January.

After the New Yorker's Book Bench blog posted on Guy P. Raffa's Danteworlds:A Reader's Guide to the Inferno, the Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy blog picked up on the thread. All of this excitement comes as the Press prepares to issue Raffa's The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy in June.

Elsewhere on the blogosphere, Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher is subjected to the page 99 test.

Ann Southworth, author of Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition has been guest-blogging about her book this week on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

The twelve books of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell collectively occupied spot number 32 on the Telegraph's list of 100 novels everyone should read.

And finally, in the wake of the Obama inauguration, suggestions for books to occupy the coveted space on the new President's bedside table have been circulating. In Washington Monthly, Andrew J. Bacevich recommends more from Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Obama has called "one of my favorite philosophers" and singles out our Irony of American History as "one volume that deserves a careful second reading."

Archived in Literature | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The National Book Critics Circle announced the nominees for its 2008 awards on Saturday. We were pleased that Seth Lerer's recent Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter is a finalist for this year's award in criticism. Offering insightful analyses of everything from Aesop's fables to Harry Potter, Lerer's book captures the rich and diverse history of children's literature in its full panorama, examining both the factors that have shaped children's literature, and how children's literature has, in turn, shaped us.

When we contacted Lerer about his nomination, he noted that since he dedicated the book to his mother, he would dedicate this honor to her as well: "She read to me, and took me to the library. There's a little vignette in the book about her taking me to the library; it's in the chapter on American libraries and American literature—the section on Johnny Tremaine."

To see the complete list of the NBCC nominees go to the NBCC Board of Directors blog. The winners will be announced on Thursday, March 12, 2009, at a ceremony held at the New School in New York.

You can read an excerpt from Children's Literature.

Archived in Awards | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Each day is another deadline. Then there is that ultimate deadline at the end of our lives. Our sense of the passage of time, and how our experience is shaped by the complexities of multiple deadlines, is the subject of Harald Weinrich's book, On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines. John Gilbey reviewed the book for the Times Higher Education:

Any tome that starts with a discussion of Hippocrates, Socrates, and Plato and ends with an analysis of the 1998 film Run Lola Run has to be worthy of closer study. This one does not disappoint.

Weinrich gives himself a very broad canvas—the impact that shortness of time has had on humanity across history—and he fills it well. He uses an unhurried, easy, and assured narrative style to tease out the complex nature of how we perceive time in natural and contrived situations.

Gilbey goes so far as to venture:

I believe that the structure and style of this book would lend itself well to being adapted for the screen, either as a single banquet or as a selection of very tasty snacks. If there is anyone out there looking to produce a high-quality, slightly quirky philosophical programme with a recognisably European flavour, then I strongly suggest that you take a look at this book and seek to secure the rights.

Rights of course can be sought through our Rights Department.

Conveniently, Times Higher Education served up quite a spread of Chicago books in their latest issue. The repast also includes:
Margaret Linley reviews The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910
Howard Segal reviews Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America
Peter J. Smith reviews Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness
and Caroline Bruzelius reviews Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals

Archived in History | Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by DB at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris Otter, author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 is today's guest on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed. On the program Otter joins host Laurie Taylor and Lynda Nead, Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, to discuss the political and social changes brought about in 19th century Britain by the use of gas lighting. Tune in at the Thinking Allowed website after the live broadcast, or find out more about Otter's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Literature | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since yesterday, when the National Endowment for the Arts announced the results of its latest study of national reading habits, scores of articles have appeared to report on its findings that "for the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature"—a great leap forward from the portrait of our habits painted by the NEA's last study, in 2002, which found that reading was "in crisis."

Amid the flood of ink spilled over this apparently dramatic shift, David Ulin's column in today's Los Angeles Times stands out as particularly nuanced. "I'm not so sure reading really was in crisis—any more than it ever has been," he writes, arguing that while he's "glad that reading also seems to be on the upswing," the NEA's report might not paint the fullest picture possible of Americans' literary lives.

Ulin points out, for example, that though the NEA for the first time included online reading habits in its survey, "nonfiction was left out of the loop.… That puts the works of David McCullough, Joseph Mitchell, Patricia Hampl and a lot of other authors into the 'not literature' category and out of the picture."

Without wading into the debate over what counts and does not count as Literature, we might suggest that if you're one of the many Americans who's been reading more fiction lately, you might also enjoy sparkling literary nonfiction by the likes of Lawrence Weschler, Greg Bottoms, Adam Biro, Shirley Hazzard, and Erin Hogan. (In addition, of course, to the fiction of Norman Maclean and Lee Siegel.)

If you're not sure where to start—or if you simply prefer to read online—allow us to point you toward excerpts of Hogan's Spiral Jetta, Biro's One Must Also Be Hungarian, and Siegel's newest novel, Love and the Incredibly Old Man.

Archived in Commentary | Fiction | Literature
Posted by at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his post yesterday on the arts blog, The Arts Fuse, Bill Marx links to a recent interview he conducted with novelist and poet Ha Jin for Public Radio International's World Books podcast. In the interview, Marx engages Jin in a discussion on the topic of the author's most recent book, The Writer as Migrant.

Marx writes:

The Writer as Migrant looks at the different ways writers have dealt with geographic displacement, from Joseph Conrad and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to V. S. Naipaul. In our conversation, Jin talks about the personal discoveries he made while writing the book, as well as his belief that history is best understood through fiction.

Navigate to the website of PRI's The World to listen and navigate to the press's website to find out more about the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Inferno, Guy P. Raffa decoded Dante's epic poem for a new generation of readers. And with the forthcoming The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy Raffa has expanded his project to encompass the entire text, through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—and into cyberspace. As the New Yorker's Vicky Raab notes in a recent article, Raffa's online version of Danteworlds offers "an integrated multimedia journey" through Dante's Divine Comedy, perfectly marrying medium with message to launch the reader "right into the allegorical action, heightening rather than dulling appreciation and comprehension." Raab continues:

Canto by canto, as Virgil and then Beatrice lead the benighted Dante through "circles of Hell, terraces of Purgatory, spheres of Paradise," so the clear-eyed Guy P. Raffa, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin who conceived and developed the site, leads students in Dante's steps, urging them to click on regions within each realm. I go straight to Circle Nine, of course, the lowest depths of the Inferno, peopled by the grisliest creatures: the giants Nimrod, Ephialtes, and Antaeus, the cannibalistic Ugolino, who eats the back of Ruggiero's head, "so that one head to the other was a hat," and, of course, the supersized, winged, tri-colored Beelzebub.

Continue reading Raab's article on the New Yorker website, or navigate to http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/ and check out the cyber version of Danteworlds for yourself.

Archived in Literature | Medieval and Renaissance | Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Davies King, author of Collections of Nothing, was the featured guest for a call-in session this Monday on NPR's Talk of the Nation. In the show, Davies discusses his unusual passion for collecting, and what's even more unusual, his passion for collecting items that most would consider junk. Davies describes his habit as a way of coping with difficulties in his life and a profound meditation on how and why we value things the way we do—and listening to the callers describe their own peculiar collections, apparently he's not the only one. Listen to King's radio appearance, and read an excerpt from his book on the NPR website.

Also, read another excerpt and an essay by the author on the press's site.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature, delivered his Nobel Lecture on December 7th at the Swedish Academy, Stockholm. Navigate to www.Nobelprize.org to view video from the lecture (French language only) or download an English translation in PDF. The lecture begins:

Why do we write? I imagine that each of us has his or her own response to this simple question. One has predispositions, a milieu, circumstances. Shortcomings, too. If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection. If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write—and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy—I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war.

The site also features a variety of other media including an interview with Le Clézio , a video clip of the author reading from one of his novels, and a photo gallery.

In 1993 the Press published Le Clézio's The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations, translated into English by Teresa Lavendar Fagan. Le Clézio's haunting book takes its readers deep into the religion of the Aztecs, powerfully evoking the dreams that made and unmade their ancient culture.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In early December, the Village Voice asked a panel of literary heavyweights (Ethan Hawke notwithstanding) to opine on their favorite obscure book. Robert Pinsky's selection was a book called Caelica from "the greatest poet unknown to many readers," Fulke Greville. In addition to being, as Pinsky notes, "an upper-class Englishman with a funny name," (or, in your correspondent's humble opinion, a moniker ripe for filching by a newly-formed indie rock band) Greville (1554–1628) was an important member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Although his poems, long out of print, are today less well known than those of Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare, Greville left an indelible mark on the world of Renaissance poetry, both in his love poems, which ably work within the English Petrarchan tradition, and in his religious meditations, which, along with the work of Donne and Herbert, stand as a highpoint of early Protestant poetics.

Pinsky, who, in addition to his many and varied achievements, including a stint as United States poet laureate and a cameo on The Simpsons, is a University of Chicago Press author (his Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town will be published this Spring), will undoubtedly be delighted to know Greville may find his elusive audience at last. In April, the Press will publish in paperback The Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited and with an introduction by Thom Gunn and a new afterword by Bradin Cormack, which includes the whole of the lyric sequence, Caelica. Back in print for a new generation of scholars and readers, Gunn's selection of Greville's short poems, along with choruses from some of Greville's verse dramas, and his thoughtful introduction to the poet is an event of the first order that is certain to rescue Greville from the ranks of the obscure.

There's more Gunn on our spring list, as well. At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, edited by Joshua Weiner, brings together essays (including one from Pinsky) that explore Gunn's pressure on the boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic, in both his life and his work. And in our Phoenix Poets, Randall Mann imagines Breakfast with Thom Gunn.

Whether you are seeking an overlooked sixteenth century bard or a twentieth-century gay literary icon, our Spring list will satisfy all.

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Poetry
Posted by at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're living in the northern U.S. it is likely that your garden is presently covered under several inches of snow, but as a recent article in the New York Times demonstrates, through the long winter months many gardeners never cease thinking about them. Writing for yesterday's "Sunday Book Review" Dominique Browning offers a list of a few of her favorite gardening books for midwinter reading that includes Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Browning writes:

The year's most thought-provoking, original and weighty garden book (though the lightest in heft) is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. Here the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization and The Dominion of the Dead, a book about cemeteries and burial practices, turns his thoughts to the garden as "sanctuary of repose." Making a garden fulfills, as Harrison puts it, "a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need." Burrowing into a more refined issue than what makes a garden, he meditates on why we garden. It's impossible to summarize the answer, overflowing as his book is with eccentric connections and voracious readings, ranging over centuries and across continents. Part of what makes it exciting is the way Harrison sets up surprise encounters with unexpected writers, who spring up as though self-seeded among the perennials. Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?…

Reading Harrison's book is like strolling down a path through a well cultivated, richly sown, light-dappled woodland. There's no point of arrival, though there may be resting places here and there. Just as in the making of a garden, there's no end to the wonder; the journey is everything. You don't have to be a gardener to love this book, but by the end you'll be asking yourself why on earth you aren't.

Read the rest of the review on the NYT website.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | History | Literature | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his November 30th review for the L. A. Times critic Art Winslow delivers an insightful assessment of the Norman Maclean Reader, which includes both previously unpublished Maclean material as well as selections from his two published works. The Reader, Winslow writes, offers Maclean fans invaluable insight into the author's life and works and exposes the deeply tragic themes that underlie them both.

There is a river that runs through Maclean's work, a strong and dark current of defeat, and if we needed further proof of that, both from his self-testimony and as evidenced in previously unpublished writing, it has arrived in the form of The Norman Maclean Reader.

Those who have read Young Men and Fire, Maclean's nonfiction reconstruction of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana, in which 13 smokejumpers were burned to death, may recall the multiple parallels Maclean drew between their fate and that of the 7th Cavalry troops under George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, another death-dealing Montana site.… The surprise here is to learn that the Custer comparisons were hardly incidental: From 1959 to 1963, primarily, Maclean struggled to write a book about the battle of the Little Bighorn and its cultural afterlife, and The Norman Maclean Reader presents five heretofore unpublished extracts from his manuscript, including sections of what was to be his conclusion, titled "Shrine to Defeat".…

[In both works] Maclean's attempt to construct a narrative in tragic form, in accordance with Aristotelian ideas, can be seen as underpinning… his [writing].

Continue reading "Defeat runs through it" »

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We were pleased to note this morning that Lennard J. Davis's new book, Obsession: A History is the frontpage story in this week's Chicago Reader. The article by the Reader's Deanna Isaacs focuses both on Davis himself and on the way his book complicates the common notion of obsession as a medical disorder, demonstrating that it's actually much more prevalent in modern society than one might guess:

We live in an age of obsession, some of us sick with it and some of us wildly successful because of it. If you ran the appointed number of miles for your workout this morning, took all your supplements, read the papers, perused all the necessary Web sites, and are planning to put in a focused, 10- or 12-hour day on the job, you're headed down the culturally approved obsessive path to reward.

If, on the other hand, you're mopping your kitchen floor ten times a day or heading to the sink for your 80th hand-washing, hoarding every plastic bag you ever got at Jewel, and lying awake at night counting the lights in neighboring buildings, someone close to you is probably suggesting that you see a doctor, get a diagnosis, and take a pill to fix your obvious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Never mind that the guy writing the prescription is just as obsessed as you are. He's on the right side of our cultural fixation and you're not.

That's the argument in Obsession: A History, UIC professor Lennard J. Davis's study of the rise and bifurcated path of obsessive behavior as both an illness and an ideal in the modern world.… He says that in our culture it's not only common but highly desirable to be a little nuts, as long as the craziness takes the form of obsession—the "singular attention to a particular thing" that our highly specialized jobs, electronically connected environment, and extreme hobbies demand.

Pick up a copy of the Reader for the complete article or find it online here. Also read an interview with the author and listen to Davis on the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Literature | Psychology
Posted by TXM at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Graydon Carter, in his review of the new book honoring George Plimpton that led the Sunday Times Book Review, began with musings about a rather different book: "It can reasonably be said that A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s monumental 12-part novel about English manners, society, politics and power, still begs for an American counterpart. Lush and majestic, the book traces the years from 1921 to 1974—pretty much the period we like to romanticize as 'the American century.'” Carter goes on to posit that Plimpton's life may be the American analog to Powell's novels. But if you wish to fact check Carter's theory, we want to remind you that the University of Chicago Press is the place to go for all your Dance lessons.

Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.

The 12-novel cycle is available in four volumes: the first movement consists of the the novels A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, and The Acceptance World ; the second movement At Lady Molly's, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, and The Kindly Ones ; the third The Valley of Bones, The Soldier's Art, and The Military Philosophers; and finally, in the fourth movement, Books Do Furnish a Room, Temporary Kings, and Hearing Secret Harmonies.

And if after 3013 pages of Powell you are hungry for more, allow UCP to sate your desire with The Fisher King: A Novel, Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, and Under Review: Further Writings on Writers, 1946-1990.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
Posted by at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a fairly common experience: before you visit a place, you read up on it, study its history and culture, plan ahead and prepare … and then when you get there, you realize that no amount of study could have prepared you for the reality that confronts you, the glorious surprises of travel at its best.

But what happens when a true scholar, with peerless knowledge of a place and its people, arrives for a lengthy visit in a place he's studied for decades? Well, if he's as open and alive to wonder as David Shulman, the result is a travel diary like no other. Spring, Heat, Rains chronicles a seven-month sojourn in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, marrying Shulman's lifetime of learning with his joyful astonishment at the details of daily life in one of the world's most ancient societies. With Shulman, author of the critically acclaimed Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, as our guide, we meet betel-nut vendors, hear singers and epic poets, and clamber over ancient temples. We endure the crippling heat of summer and the desperately desired—but frustratingly inescapable—monsoon rains that follow. And we fall deeply, completely in love with an unforgettable place and the life of its people. Lyrical and lush, Spring, Heat, Rains will enchant anyone who has ever dreamed of India.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Literature | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's Washington Post story about Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America chronicles the emergence as "a major player on the Hill" of the first nonpartisan organization dedicated to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The veterans' group might not have the budget or membership or fancy clients of some of the lobbying shops that line K Street," the Post notes. "But its leaders, most of whom are younger than 30, are keenly aware of the problems their unique constituency faces—post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, repeated tours—a fact that has helped the fledgling nonprofit group become a powerful voice for the 1.8 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan on this Veterans Day."

For those of us who don't work on Capitol Hill, Operation Homecoming tells the stories of those same veterans, in their own words. Called "the honest voice of war" by Jeff Shaara, this volume is the result of an initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases to inspire U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and their families to record their wartime experiences. Encouraged by such authors as Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front. These unflinching eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters offer an intensely revealing look into the extraordinary lives of soldiers and veterans.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, "One of the chanted mantras of our time is, 'But I support the troops.' Terrific. Now read Operation Homecoming to find out who they are, what they think, feel, want, have learned, won and lost in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The San Francisco Chronicle recently published an interesting review of The Writer as Migrant—the latest book from award winning poet, novelist, and Chinese expat, Ha Jin. Consisting of a series of essays that explore the significance of writing outside of one's homeland and in a foreign language, the book focuses not only on the author's own experience but also considers those of other famous exiles—like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang—examining how each grapples "with issues of identity and tradition," and their capacity to act as sounding boards for the voices of their native countries. From the review:

In the preface to Between Silences, his first book of poetry, published in 1990, Ha Jin proclaimed that he spoke for those who suffered and endured, those fooled or ruined by history—a Chinese writer who wrote in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese.

Nearly two decades later, Jin says that he has come to see the "silliness of that ambition.…"

"[T]oo much sincerity is a dangerous thing. It can overheat one's brain," he drolly notes in his compelling new collection of essays, The Writer as Migrant.…

"Just as a creative writer should aspire to be not a broker but a creator of culture, a great novel does not only present a culture but also makes culture; such a work does not only bring news of the world but also evokes the reader's empathy and reminds him of his own existential condition."

Read the rest of the review on the San Francisco Chronicle's companion website, SFGate.com.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller reviewed The Norman Maclean Reader last Saturday. Maclean published only one book, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, during his lifetime, but that one book—published when he was 74—assured his place in American literature.

Keller talks about why he didn't publish more:

Whether living in Illinois or Montana, though, Maclean wrote constantly; it was his perfectionism that kept him from publishing until he was in his seventh decade, his sense that a work could always be made better, the ideas sharper, the images more telling.

Because he cared so much about getting it just right, writing never came easy for him. In a 1986 interview reprinted in The Norman Maclean Reader, he said of literature, "It's a highly disciplined art. It's costly. You have to give up a lot of yourself to do it well. It's like anything you do that's rather beautiful."

We have a website for Norman Maclean.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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Sunday marked what would have been the 103rd birthday of the eldest daughter of novelist Thomas Mann. Erika Mann, born November 9, 1905, was a writer in her own right, though her father's fame overshadowed her own accomplishments in her lifetime. More recently, however, Andrea Weiss has restored Erika, and her brother Klaus, to their rightful places in the spotlight.

In the Shadow of Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story is an intimate portrait of Mann's two eldest children, who were unconventional, rebellious, and fiercely devoted to each other. Empowered by their close bond, they espoused vehemently anti-Nazi views in a Europe swept up in fascism and were openly, even defiantly, gay in an age of secrecy and repression. They were serious authors, performance artists before the medium existed, and political visionaries whose searing essays and lectures are still relevant today. And, as Andrea Weiss reveals in this dual biography, their story offers a fascinating view of the literary and intellectual life, political turmoil, and shifting sexual mores of their times.

In the Shadow of Magic Mountain was the lead review in the November 6 London Review of Books and has been praised by the late John Leonard in Harper's and in the Times (UK): "A fascinating tale. Outside the pages of the Manns' own memoirs and essays, or of Klaus's deeply personal fiction, it's hard to imagine it more sympathetically told." To celebrate Erika's birthday, dress in your finest androgynous fashions and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian | Literature
Posted by at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Phillip Adams, host of the Australian news radio show Late Night Live, recently conducted an interview with poet and novelist Ha Jin, a Chinese ex-pat who struggled through his country's Cultural Revolution as an uneducated soldier in the People's Liberation Army to eventually become one of the United States' most admired writers of world literature. Jin has authored numerous semi-fictional books about China and Chinese culture in the English language including his most famous Waiting and War Trash.

In the interview, he discusses his hard fought journey to literary stardom and the new place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—topics that also take center stage in his most recent book The Writer as Migrant, a book that places his own life as a literary exile alongside those of other migrant writers from Nabokov to Naipaul.

Listen to the archived audio of the interview on the Late Night Live website.

Or, find out more about The Writer as Migrant.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Life in Italy is seldom simple. One does not go there for simplicity but for interest: to make the adventure of existence more vivid, more poignant.” Such a life is what Shirley Hazzard found when she first landed on the shore of Naples as a young woman in the early 1950s: underneath the devastation caused by World War II, the city that had bewitched such literary visitors as Byron and Goethe remained intact, ready to charm the patient and attentive traveler.

That sojourn was the first step in a lifelong love affair with Naples. Along with her late husband, Francis Steegmuller, Hazzard made Naples a second home for decades, and The Ancient Shore collects the best of her writings on the city, its people, and its literary heritage. While acknowledging that Naples can be off-putting to the casual tourist, Hazzard takes readers behind the city’s rebarbative face, showing the underlying beauty and unrivaled hospitality that await those who take the time to truly understand its rhythms and its history. A much-loved New Yorker essay by Steegmuller telling the harrowing story of his mugging—and the attentive care he received in its aftermath—rounds out a collection that memorably limns the inherent contradictions of contemporary Naples: prickly but passionate, violent but giving, and always breathtakingly unforgettable. Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From a youth spent as a manual laborer in China’s Cultural Revolution to winning the National Book Award for his novel Waiting, Ha Jin has taken a remarkable journey across eras and continents, one that has left him one of the most admired figures in world literature. Now, in his first work of nonfiction, he reflects on the very circumstance of being a writer in a new land, a representative, willingly or not, of a place one has left—but can never truly leave behind.

In The Writer as Migrant, Ha Jin explores his own life and work alongside those of writers throughout literary history who have found themselves, exiles or immigrants, struggling to find their way in a new place and a new culture. Writing in a clear, almost conversational style, he considers the works of writers from Joseph Conrad to W.G. Sebald, Vladimir Nabokov to V. S. Naipaul, exploring questions of language, politics, duty, and the very concept of home. Some of those writers have served as models for Ha Jin, while others have remained enigmas—or even antagonists—but all have been crucial to his understanding of the complicated place of a migrant writer.

A slim but powerful reflection, The Writer as Migrant introduces us to a new facet of one of our most exciting writers, revealing him to be a thoughtful, penetrating, and generous reader of literature as well.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month marks four years since the death of a philospher who then-French president Jacques Chirac remembered as “one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time.” Jacques Derrida died in Paris on October 8, 2004, but his legacy lives on in many fields of the humanities, as well as many volumes of books published by the University of Chicago Press. The most recent is the newly-published Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida by Mustapha Chérif.

In the spring of 2003, Derrida sat down for a public debate in Paris with Algerian intellectual Chérif. The eminent philosopher arrived at the event directly from the hospital where he had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the illness that would take his life just over a year later. That he still participated in the exchange testifies to the magnitude of the subject at hand: the increasingly distressed relationship between Islam and the West, and the questions of freedom, justice, and democracy that surround it.

For more on Derrida, check out Chicago’s extensive list of his publications and our website memorial in honor of the great philosopher.

Archived in Literature | Philosophy
Posted by at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Senator John Kerry is catching a lot of flak for the widely reported joke he told earlier this week at Senator John McCain's expense. Reportedly, though, the joke generated "lots of laughter" in Kerry's audience. Whether the crack makes you laugh or wince (or both), Ted Cohen's Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters can explain how this joke—-and others like it—work. For Cohen, jokes are complicated transactions in which communities are forged, intimacy is offered, and otherwise offensive stereotypes and cliches lose their sting—at least sometimes. In other cases, the sting just becomes more potent. Indeed, the fuss over Kerry's joke is just the latest in a series of incidents that exemplify American humor's increasingly embattled nature.

Immersing us in the ranks of contemporary joke tellers—from Jon Stewart to Bill Clinton to Beavis and Butt-Head—who aim to do more than simply amuse, Paul Lewis's Cracking Up explains how American humor functions in these contentious times. Stephen Kercher's Revel with a Cause (excerpt), meanwhile, reminds us of the debt that comics like Stewart and Stephen Colbert owe to Mort Sahl, Stan Freberg, and Lenny Bruce—liberal satirists who, through their wry and scabrous comedic routines, waged war against the political ironies, contradictions, and hypocrisies of their times.

In short, today's political jokes have a long backstory. And how many places other than here can you read about the rich intellectual tradition of what, at first glance, might have seemed like throw-away laugh lines?

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adults looking for something to read during the American Library Association's Teen Read Week October 12 to 18 should look no further than Seth Lerer's Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. Amid other revelations about teen staples from Judy Blume novels to the Harry Potter series, Lerer shows that the category of Young Adult literature was originally created to keep "offensive" materials off the children's shelves of libraries.

His breadth, ecompassing centuries of books for children of all ages, virtually guarantees that you'll discover something new in Children's Literature about a book you loved as a kid. Chicagoans can even make those discoveries in person, when Lerer presents his book tonight at the Newberry Library (which, on a related note, currently has a great exhibition featuring its collection of children's books--700 years worth of them). If you're not able to make it, you can at least console yourself with this excerpt.

Archived in Author Events | Literature
Posted by at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, before the Swedish Academy awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Academy secretary Horace Engdahl caused a bit of a kerfuffle by suggesting that "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

Notwithstanding GalleyCat's recent musing on how "Engdahl makes the leap from American publishers not cranking out more world literature in translation to American novelists not being as good as their European counterparts," it's true that books in translation make up only about three percent of U.S. publishers' output.

UCP, happily, has made a healthy contribution to the three percent. We are perhaps best known in this arena for making French philosophy available to American readers, but our long list of books in translation also includes works that range from Le Clézio's The Mexican Dream and the epic The Journey to the West to a wide selection of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's writings and Rumi's mystical poems. Providing an insider's view of this world of literature, Mary Ann Caws's Surprised in Translation celebrates the occasional and fruitful peculiarity that results from some of the most flavorful translations of well-known authors.

For more translations of well-known—and unknown—authors, explore Words Without Borders or Three Percent. And, of course, our international selections of fiction, poetry, and folklore.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
Posted by at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Swedish Academy announced today that French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Among the dozen works by Le Clézio translated into English, the University of Chicago Press published The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations. Unlike most of Le Clézio’s work, The Mexican Dream is nonfiction. “What motivated me,” Le Clézio said, “was a sort of dream about what has disappeared and what could have been.” Many dreams unfold in the book: the dream that was the religion of the Aztecs, the dream of the conquistadores, and a dream of the present—a meditation on the ways that Amerindian civilizations move the imaginations of Europeans.

The translator of The Mexican Dream is Teresa Lavender Fagan, who also works here at the Press. Teresa has this response to the news:

I am delighted—but not at all surprised!—that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When I read Le rêve mexicain—The Mexican Dream—for the first time, I was transported by Le Clézio’s language and message. The author imagined how the thought of early Indian civilizations might have evolved if not for the interruption of European conquest. And how our own civilization might have been different had we had the continued input of such advanced, now vanished, peoples. Those questions, and Le Clézio’s recounting of the Conquest in his beautiful, lyrical prose, truly transformed my view of Western civilization. It is an honor to have translated the book and to have worked with the author, a most deserving Nobel Prize winner.

An audio interview with Le Clézio is on the Nobel Prize website.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
Posted by DB at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As if we weren't already struggling to sort through all of this election season's political analogies, Stephen Greenblatt threw literature into the mix when he appeared last week on self-fashioned pundit Stephen Colbert's show to ponder which presidential candidates are like which Shakespearean characters.

Does Obama's story parallel Hamlet's? Was Macbeth the original "McMaverick"? In addition to answering such crucial questions, this Shakespearean smackdown lends literary heft to the staging of tonight's presidential debate at Nashville's Belmont University.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
Posted by at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Davies King, author of Collections of Nothing was interviewed yesterday by Deborah Harper for the Psychjourney website podcast. King's book is an illuminating mediation on the author's own habit of amassing the most unusual collections—everything from cereal boxes to nondescript loops of wire—things which many people might regard as junk, but which King finds that by collecting, he can imbue with meaning, even value.

In the podcast, Harper engages King in a discussion about his book, his collections, and his fascinating insights on the impulse to accumulate. Navigate to the Psychjourney website to listen.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Popmatters website recently posted an interesting review of William Davies King's new book Collections of Nothing. In the review David Banash praises King for using an introspective meditation on his own habit of collecting to produce a revelatory look at the everyday objects that fill our lives. Banash writes:

In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction… [Walter] Benjamin suggests that the power of the camera to bring our world into focus dramatically alters our perception of it, most often by slowing things down or getting us much closer to them, and King's fascinating habit of collecting does, I think, something much the same.…

King is one of the few people who have taken the time to really look at our world of disposable objects. His practice of collecting has slowed him down and shifted him into a new mode of consciousness, and he thus allows us something like a close-up, slow-motion pan across all the objects that we so quickly turn away from that they never really register with us as the things that they are. King's altered consciousness is not a gateway into some other world, but a blinding illumination of our everyday unconscious.

Read the review on the Popmatters website.

Also read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday's Financial Times ran a positive review of Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips' psychoanalytic exploration of human intimacy in their new book, Intimacies. Summarizing the work the FT's Salley Vickers writes:

Taking the form of a conversation between this congenial but not necessarily like-minded pair, Intimacies explores the pitfalls and possibilities of human intimacy and the damage that a zeal to know ourselves and others can wreak. The exchange of views reflects the authors' philosophies: differences are the source, not the stumbling blocks, of intimacy; distance should enhance not diminish pleasure in others' company; and it is disastrous to take things personally.

Read the full review on the Financial Times website.

Archived in Literature | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eugene G. Schwartz offers an excellent review of Susan Bielstein's guide through the labyrinthine world of visual image copyright law, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property, for his latest posting on ForeWord magazine's Publishing Matters blog:

Before the internet, and especially before desk top publishing, you pretty much had to work with physical copies of things.… This imposed a variety of practical barriers that kept the leakage of rights to a minimum and concentrated its more substantial flow in the hands of professional thieves.

All of that has changed—and with the low cost and ubiquity of scanners, [and] cell phone cameras… gate-keeping the rights of images is like keeping a safe deposit box in a room with an open window.

Nonetheless, the publishing industry still relies on copyright law as the foundation of its economic viability. As all who read ForeWord well know, publishers have struggled to cope with establishing rights in an electronic world, and authors and agents have been pushing back while warily going with the flow.

All of this leads to a book I'd like to recommend to any of you who are interested in the subject, and especially if you deal with pictures as well as intellectual property and copyright in general: Permissions, A Survival Guide. Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property, by Susan M. Bielstein.

The author is the executive editor for art, architecture, classical studies and film at the University of Chicago Press.… The practical value of this work is that it draws on the author's experience and she takes you through the details of everything from choosing the size and format of digital files that you may be ordering to how to negotiate on price with museums. There is also a useful bibliography and a short list of image banks and artist's rights organizations.

The real meat on the bone of this work, however, is the author's blending of anecdotal experience, procedural advice and a critical effort to point the way out of the box that electronic reproduction and increasing layers of rights control are putting the users of creative assets—adding thickets of procedural obstacles and barriers of cost that lead either to shrinking use and availability or increasing use without permission.

Read the rest of the review on the Publishing Matters blog.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Law | Literature | Reference and Writing | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The arts and culture website Trickhouse.com is currently featuring an online exhibition of the collages of William Davies King, professor of theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the recently released Collections of Nothing. King's book is a profound meditation on his habit of gathering miscellany—what many would consider junk. But through the careful organization and presentation of his collections, King demonstrates how even the most humble objects are able to accrue new, individualized value. And King's collages, accompanied by an insightful curatorial essay by David Banash, are a particularly interesting example of this phenomenon. Navigate to www.trickhouse.org and click on door #3 to visit the online exhibition.

Also read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In remembrance of Nobel Prize winning novelist, dramatist, and historian Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn who passed away last Sunday, the Boston Globe blog Off the Shelf has posted a short piece excerpting from Ha Jin's forthcoming collection of essays about literary exiles, The Writer as Migrant. Solzhenitsyn lived much of his life in exile from his Russian homeland due to his sharp criticism of the government and the publication of his writings about the Soviet Gulag. In the opening essay of his book, Jin explores Solzhenitsyn's life in exile and the reception of his writings in his Russian homeland and in the Western world to which he was forced to flee.

Navigate to the Off the Shelf blog to read the excerpt.

Ha Jin's The Writer as Migrant is currently scheduled for publication in November of 2008.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
Posted by TXM at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July 31 edition of the London Review of Books has published several interesting articles focusing on two recent books, both of which offer some intriguing insights into the West's engagement with Middle Eastern Muslim cultures in the twentieth century.

As the LRB's Roxanne Varzi notes, Gillian Whitlock's Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit is a fascinating exploration of modern Middle Eastern autobiography, that demonstrates how the genre has been used in Western society as a window into an often inaccessible culture, but perhaps more often is appropriated and commodified by Western culture to serve its own interests. In her article Varzi focuses on the latter phenomenon writing:

"You shouldn't overlook the what Gillian Whitlock in Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, calls the paratext: the liminal features that surround the text, not just the book's jacket and typeface but interviews with the author, reviews and commentaries. It is in transit, as commodities, that these narratives, which Whitlock calls 'veiled memoirs,' are shaped by and for the public. Whitlock reproduces an Audi ad that shows [Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran], outfitted in a cream suit, floating among shelves of books in a library (a library that contains no contemporary Iranian literature) above the words: 'Never let reality get in the way of imagination.' She is presented as the embodiment of imagination, and yet the 'reality' of contemporary Iran, which she claims to reveal to her audiences, is what provides her cultural capital.

Reading these memoirs, like watching bad reality television, gives the false sense that we are being told the 'truth' by the powerless at a time when those with the power to construct reality have limited our access to the facts.

The July 31LRB also contains an interesting piece by Megan Vaughn on Richard C. Keller's Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa—a book that explores the history of French psychology in North Africa and its complicated nature as both a progressive and innovative scientific endeavor, and as a means for furthering colonial goals.

Pick up a copy of this month's LRB to read the full reviews.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Literature | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Alford reviewed William Davies King's book, Collections of Nothing, in Sunday's New York Times Book Review. King, writes Alford, inspires a certain wariness in the reader:

We're talking about a man who once collected worn strips of masking tape that he pulled off the floor of a gymnasium, a man who collects the business cards of business card printers, even though he himself carries no business card.…

Part memoir and part disquisition on the psychological impulses behind the urge to accumulate, Collections of Nothing is a wonderfully frank and engaging look at one man's detritus-fueled pathology. King's honesty and ambivalence about his pastime only increases his emotional connection to the reader. I wanted, by turns, to breast-feed and strangle him.

King believes that the impulse to collect comes "partly from a wound we feel deep inside this richest, most materialistic of all societies." But he also considers other possibilities—"It finds order in things, virtue in preservation, knowledge in obscurity, and above all it discovers and even creates value." His own fondness is for "the mute, meager, practically valueless object. … What I like is the potency of the impotent thing, the renewed and adorable life I find in the dead and despised object." For him, there's "something in nothing." A lot of nothing

Read the rest of the review and read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Davies King makes no bones about it: he's odd. And his collections are odder: loops of wire, skeleton keys, seafood tins, water bottle labels, envelope liners, strips of masking tape, canceled credit cards, boulders—and that's just for starters. You might call it junk, but to King, it's a very special sort of nothing. Suffice it to say, no one on earth has a garage quite like his.

King's unusual collections reflect his belief in the intrinsic value of the discarded, unwanted, and ephemeral—but as he makes clear in Collections of Nothing, the urge that drives his hoarding is not all that different from that which leads a more typical person to prize uncanceled stamps or pristine sets of baseball cards. Both an affecting memoir and an idiosyncratic examination of the desire to accumulate, Collections of Nothing takes us deep inside the soul of the solitary collector. King's life story is deftly interleaved with his insightful meditations on the nature of the acquisitive mind; the result is a book that defies categorization, a unique hybrid that will speak to anyone who has ever found himself bitten by the collecting bug.

Read the press release. Also, read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Press Releases
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Colin Marshall of the Santa Barbara Independent talked to of William Davies King last week about his new book, Collections of Nothing. From broken folding chairs to soup labels, as Marshall writes, "King's are collections of nothing, that is, things of no outward value." Yet through the act of gathering, organizing, and displaying these objects, King finds them imbued with a deeply personal significance:

"It comes out of a 20th-century vocabulary of art, going back to Dadaism, which was an art that believed in nothing" King said. "My own education led me to the Dadaist artists and their strange, often outsider art that was alert to the idea that emptiness of meaning might be as expressive and 'true' as art that purports to be full of meaning. I searched for artwork that would express my own anxiety in the face of the modern world's questionable values. I think anxiety takes the form of nothingness: it's this strange void within you that never seems to get filled up."

Read the article on the Santa Barbara Independent website. We have an excerpt from the book and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Literature
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Few fictional works are as long, or as universally acclaimed, as Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Originally published in twelve volumes over a thirty-year period, we republished them in 1995 in a lovely package of four books. Powell's epic literary tale of twentieth-century London continues to enthrall readers. Cynthia Crossen has an appreciative review in today's Wall Street Journal. From the review:

I have just finished the first two books in the 12-volume cycle, and I'm definitely going to read the rest. I've thrown in my lot, at least for the next few weeks, with Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, and his well-born friends, lovers and enemies in England between 1914 and 1971.

Novels of manners are often dismissed as soap operas, aimed at women who cut their literary teeth on Jane Austen. Men don't live in the parlor; they go to war, or at least to work. But Mr. Powell, from his own experience, knew that men indeed live in the parlor, like it or not, and spend agonizing amounts of time trying to make sense out of other people's domestic behavior. Mr. Powell, wrote the English critic V. S. Pritchett, "revived the masculine traditions of English social comedy."

What elevates soap opera to the level of literature are the intelligence, sensitivity and comic eye of the author, especially how deeply he or she penetrates human character. Appearances are important, too, and Mr Powell is a puckish observer of the human form. "His hands were small and gnarled, with nails worn short and cracked, as if he spent his spare time digging with them down in the soil. Stringham had said that the nails of the saint who had hollowed out his own grave without tools might fairly have competed against Widmerpool's in a manicure contest."

Click on the first search result on Google News to read the full review, or find out more about the books on our website:

A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement

A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement

A Dance to the Music of Time: Third Movement

A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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The July 4 Times Literary Supplement ran an excellent review Evelyn Bloch-Dano's Madame Proust: A Biography—an engaging account of the life of Jeanne Wiel, mother to Marcel Proust, and as Bloch-Dano demonstrates, a decisive influence on the great writer's career. Touching on a myriad of ways in which Proust's mother helped to mold her son into one of the nineteenth-century's most famous novelists the review pays special attention to Proust's mother as a German Jew living in France just before the Dreyfus affair, which revealed the strong undercurrents of antisemitism and injustice that permeated French culture and greatly affected the role Jeanne took in protecting her son from the social pressures and prejudices of the day. Ingrid Wassenar writes for the TLS:

For Bloch-Dano the key to Jeanne is her status as an assimilated Jew. She is represented as a Third Republic Esther: "To save her people, Esther must hide her true origins without ever denying them." In the Old Testament, Esther treads a fine line between obeying the Persian King Ahasuerus and placating her Israelite uncle, Mordecai. In similar ways Jeanne Weil did not truly belong to herself.…

Madame Proust raises fascinating questions about the nature of maternal love and the degree to which motherhood necessitates self-effacement. As the author insists: "We have to admit that this supremely intelligent woman had no other ambition than the happiness of her loved ones. She wouldn't have conceived of her role as sacrificial, but let's hope there were some secondary benefits.…"

Read an excerpt from the book on our website.

In the same issue Paul Reitter continues on the theme of Judaism in Western culture with a review of Michael P. Steinberg's Judaism Musical and Unmusical. Steinberg's book argues that modernity gave rise to a Jewish consciousness that has increasingly distanced itself from the sacred in favor of worldliness and secularity—a trend contributed to by a who's who of Jewish composers and intellectuals including such figures as Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Salomon, Arnaldo Momigliano, Leonard Bernstein, and Daniel Libeskind. From Reitter's review:

In 1934, Sigmund Freud, old, ailing, and painfully aware of the precariousness of the political situation in Austria, decided to write a book about Moses.… Completed in exile in Britain, Moses and Monotheism argues —doggedly and not very convincingly—that Moses was an Egyptian. Thus, at a time of unprecedented Jewish dispossession, we find Freud struggling mightily to take away Moses, too.… [But in] Steinberg's reading, Freud, by denying "his people" Moses, does nothing other than make his greatest gift to "the Jews."

The idea on which this interpretation rests is an organizing principle in Steinberg's book. What he admires and wants to track are certain modern Jewish "subjectivities," ones that for him emerged vividly in Central Europe and … involved "resisting" the ideology of origins, "loving history," and cultivating a reflective cosmopolitan "secularity.…"

Steinberg's "constellating of Jewishness…could well have a substantial impact on discussions of Central European Jewish culture, where, as he emphasizes, there is a pressing need for new conceptual life.

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Music | Reviews
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Set in the fictitious town of Manawaka, Manitoba, Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel offers a moving portrait of its protagonist, nonagenarian Hagar Shiply, as she struggles to come to terms with the troubles of her past in a dramatic story of a life drawing to a close. Alongside the other novels in her "Manawaka series"—A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House: Stories, and The Diviners—Laurence's The Stone Angel has been lauded as one of her most poignant narratives and the most famous work by one of Canada's most prominent feminist writers.

The book was also recently made into a feature film by Canadian filmmaker Kari Skogland with its world premiere showing at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. This Friday, July 11 the film will also see its U.S. debut in select theaters, including NYC's Landmark Century theaters, and hopefully will see a wider distribution (to Chicago maybe) in the following weeks. Check out a trailer for the film on the official The Stone Angel movie website, or find out more about the book here.

Archived in Books for the News | Fiction | Literature
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Seth Lerer was featured on the Wednesday July 2 edition of WBUR's On Point with guest host Jane Clayson to discuss his new book Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. More than just a historical account of the iconic works of children's literature, as Clayson notes, Lerer's book can be read as a history of childhood itself as children are indelibly molded by the tales they hear and read—stories they will one day share with their own sons and daughters.

Listen to the podcast of their fascinating discussion about children's literature and what it tells us about growing up on the WBUR website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July 7 edition of The New Yorker briefly but approvingly notes William Davies King's memoir of his lifelong obsession with ephemera, Collections of Nothing. The New Yorker praises the book for "the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating that the two stories are essentially one" and continues:

"I lost and found myself in remote topical aisles of scholarship-wreck," [King] says of his hours in Yale's library, reading the most obscure books he could find. His hard-won self-awareness gives his disclosures an intensity that will likely resonate with all readers, even those whose collections of nothing contain nothing at all.

Read the rest at The New Yorker website. Also read an excerpt from the book and an essay by King, “Nothing to Speak About.”

Collections of Nothing was also an object of much affection on Omnivoracious and the cover is “Most Coveted Cover #181” over at Readerville.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article today about the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria discussing, among other topics, a fascinating talk given by Professor Alan Liu—one of the leading theorists focusing on the intersection between digital technology and the humanities, and the author of several books on the subject including, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information and the forthcoming Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Writing for the Chronicle William Pannapacker takes note of Liu's talk for its examination of the increasing use of digital information resources like Wikipedia by students, and the problem of its limitations in terms of scholarly authority. Pannapacker writes:

Since it's clear enough that Wikipedia—and other sites based on reader-generated content—are too large and accessible to police themselves effectively, Liu argues that the responsibility for that policing should be adopted by the already existing structures of authority, including academe in particular.

I have to agree: We can't get our students into the libraries; we hardly go there ourselves anymore, as much as we might love them. The time has just about arrived when information that is not online does not exist for most people.…

Of course, Liu's presentation raises more questions than it answers: There are, after all, so many complications about the means by which credibility can be rated. We all know the peer-review system is not perfect.

But Liu's vision of a more public, collaborative